Dying by the sword (18 page)
Read Dying by the sword Online
Authors: Sarah d'Almeida
As Athos was about to set his feet on the steps, he heard a voice say, “Monsieur, monsieur. I have bound wounds before. Please do not tell me how to do it.”
The voice was undeniably Grimaud’s, and undeniably it spoke the truth. Athos’s first thought was that one of the servants had got wounded and that Grimaud was binding his wound, while discussing it with the other servant. Perhaps, in fact, Mousqueton had escaped the Bastille, through either cunning or luck, and was wounded, and this wound Grimaud was attempting to bind. But there was no possible way their servants—by now as much comrades at arms as they, themselves were—would call each other monsieur.
They perhaps liked Bazin a little less than the other three, but even he would never be addressed as monsieur. They called him Bazin, and might roll their eyes at his pious pronouncements, and yet they did what they could to keep him safe and they remained his friends.
“Grimaud,” Planchet’s voice said. “He faints. My master faints.”
This was a completely different matter. What D’Artagnan would be doing in Athos’s kitchen, and why he should be fainting, was totally beyond Athos’s comprehension. But Athos was almost old enough to be D’Artagnan’s father, and the young Gascon, with his quickness of mind, his cunning, his brilliance with a sword and his unswerving loyalty to his friends, was exactly the son that Athos would have liked to claim. There was between them a bond that was only half friendship. The other half was Athos’s almost desperate wish to protect the young man from the strokes he himself had suffered at the hands of fate.
The idea that D’Artagnan was wounded or ill carried him all the way into the kitchen and onto a scene of the purest mayhem. There was blood all over, on every possible surface. The kitchen table, at which Grimaud normally prepared food, and at which Grimaud ate—no matter how often Athos told him he could serve him there, also, if they were alone. Grimaud insisted on serving the man who would always be Monsieur le Comte to him either in the dining room or in Athos’s own room—had bloodstains, and a basin filled with blood-colored water. Bloodied rags littered the floor. There was blood on the servants, blood on Aramis’s incredibly elaborate doublet, cut according to the latest and most daring fashion, in blue velvet and flame-colored satin, and on Porthos’s cheek and the ends of his red hair.
In the midst of all this, D’Artagnan sat, stripped to the waist. There was blood all over him too, blood on the various ligatures wound around his arm. And, as Athos watched, the rest of them, not seeing him, had rallied around D’Artagnan with the obvious idea of preventing an imminent collapse. Aramis was supporting the young man, and Porthos was helping—one hampering the other, in the way the two of them were likely to, when they both acted out of the best intentions and without coordinating intents. And, standing by D’Artagnan, Grimaud—Grimaud, who sometimes could behave as though alcohol were the enemy of man, as the puritans in England believed—was pouring something amber colored into D’Artagnan’s half-open mouth.
“D’Artagnan,” Athos said, shocked. “What is here?”
The boy sat up straight at Athos’s voice, as he hadn’t at the swallow of what Athos guessed was brandy. He pushed the glass away, as though embarrassed by it or by his weakness, and he looked up at Athos, trying to force a smile onto a much-too-pale face. “It is nothing. A scratch. A wound hardly worth mentioning.”
“Wounded,” Athos said, and because this was something he understood, he turned without one more word, and took his stairs, two steps at a time, to his bedroom where, from the bottom of his clothes press, he extracted a jar that the Gascon himself had given to him months ago. Back to the kitchen, jar in hand, he stretched it to Grimaud. “The ointment that Monsieur D’Artagnan was so good as to give me when I was wounded, Grimaud. You remember its effect on me, and I’m sure it will have a like effect on him.”
Grimaud, used to his master’s ways, took the jar and uncorked it, while he directed Planchet, “You will have to undo that ligature, Planchet,” and, to D’Artagnan’s quickly suppressed moan, “There’s nothing for it, Monsieur D’Artagnan, and it was your fault as well as mine, for Monsieur le Comte is exactly right. If you’d reminded me you’d given us a pot of the ointment, we would have used it to start with.”
Athos, who had enough experience with wounds, not only from attempting to bind his own, but from binding Aramis’s and Porthos’s too, after duels when servants weren’t available, moved to help Planchet and soon had managed to remove the bandage without causing D’Artagnan to do more than bite his lower lip and grow twice as pale.
He examined the long, deep gash beneath. He would not put his finger in it to test the hypothesis, but he was almost absolutely sure that the sword had cut to the bone. “How did this happen?” he asked. “How did you get cut like this, D’Artagnan? Was it while you were pretending to be a servant? Did anyone take a sword to you while you were unarmed?”
Perhaps something of his anger at the idea showed in his eyes, because D’Artagnan looked alarmed. “No, Athos. No. It happened after that, at the royal palace.”
Athos raised his eyebrows as he slathered the wound with the ointment from Gascony, whose miraculous, but proven, claim it was that had any wound not reached a vital organ, the ointment would cure it in no time. In their trip to Gascony, Athos had found this ointment was universal, and perhaps explained the madcap character of the Gascons, who would rather fight than speak. Or for that matter, would rather talk than eat or make love. Knowing they could impunely escape wounds had made them willing to receive the worst wounds without dying, and they had lost all reason to restrain themselves.
“I went to the royal palace at . . . That is . . . There was a note . . .” He blushed. “From Constance.”
Athos felt his expression harden. Right then, all he could think about was that Constance Bonacieux, D’Artagnan’s lover, had somehow betrayed him. But he just stopped himself saying so, when Aramis looked up at him, and said, in a slow, sullen voice, as though he resented having to reveal even a little of his private life. “It was my fault,” he said. “I’m sure it was me they were trying to kill, or kidnap, or do who knows what to.”
Porthos grunted at this. “It could have been me,” he said. “I had, you know, just called a lot of attention to myself by setting the hammer swinging into the swords, and it is not unlikely someone realized what the truth was, despite D’Artagnan’s clever story about the ghost. And you know, if they knew, there were reasons they might have been angry at me.”
“Plebeians, you mean,” Aramis said, his words tolling with absolute disdain. “If you’re about to convince me that the six men in cloaks who attacked us were in fact from that neighborhood, I am not likely to believe it, my friend. No man who hasn’t had extreme learning in swordplay could possibly have fought like that. Nor was their attack, coordinated and seemingly planned, a mere revenge for what they would doubtless think of as a mere prank in the workshop.”
Athos, listening to all these disconnected words, found it hard to formulate a question of his own. From what he could gather, while he was at the Palais Cardinal, his friends had been running around town, each in his several ways, doing his best to call attention to himself and—incidentally—to cause as much trouble as humanly possible.
He started and discarded several lines of enquiry. He knew that asking Porthos about taking a hammer to swords would only cause a flow of words more likely to leave him bewildered than not. And he rather suspected that asking Aramis about why he believed this was his fault would only cause him to say some nonsense about some woman or other—or possibly worse—about some point of theology and divine retribution. And D’Artagnan, whose lips Grimaud was, again, solicitously wetting with brandy, did not seem able to assemble more than two words without succumbing to blood loss.
Athos, normally so fluent with words and so ready with classical quotations, suddenly felt a great empathy with his friend Porthos, to whose lips words would never come when called.
Having fastened D’Artagnan’s bind, he crossed his arms upon his chest. “What have you been doing? All three of you? For you must give me leave to tell you that it seems like you’ve all gone around like madmen, attempting to get killed.”
Where the Importance of Melons Must Outweigh that of Hammers; Brandy and Blood; A Musketeer’s Trust
OF all of his friends, D’Artagnan retained his greatest admiration, not to say hero worship, for Athos. Oh, it could be said in many ways that the young Gascon revered all his friends. How could it be otherwise? His father had raised him in awe of those servants of the King. He had trained him to use his sword as one of them could be expected to use his. For the longest time—in fact, since he’d first been breeched—D’Artagnan’s entire ambition had been to wear a musketeer’s uniform. In that uniform, he hoped to follow the footsteps of those other sons of Gascony who had made themselves famous, if not rich, in the capital.
Indeed, he viewed Porthos as a new Ajax, and lived in silent admiration of Aramis’s worldly ways, his understanding of court gossip and his easy grasp of the more obscure points of theology—save for the patent meaning of the seventh commandment. Aramis’s influence had greatly improved D’Artagnan’s mode of dress and of wearing his hair, and Porthos’s not-quite-voiced exasperation had taught him to use his sword better and to move his feet with the grace of a dancer, as his giant comrade did.
Still, when all was said and done, Athos was the one of the musketeers who commanded D’Artagnan’s near veneration. If D’Artagnan could have chosen to be any man at all, he would have been Athos. It wasn’t that he was blind to Athos’s defects of character—in their time as friends, he had come to know Athos’s deep grief and the things he used to hide it, from wine to his sudden, blind rages. But he also knew that Athos held himself with an iron-strong will and to principles so high that he would never stoop to doing anything dishonorable. In fact, the more he knew Athos, the more he’d come to admire him, for the faults he did not allow to affect others, as much as for his obvious nobility of character. Still young enough to need guidance, D’Artagnan had chosen Athos as his mentor and the tutor of his mind.
To see Athos this angry at them cut him to the quick. The emotion was increased by his patently weakened state, his having lost enough blood to feel dizzy and vaguely nauseous. To Athos’s words, he could only say, “Oh, pray, don’t be so furious. We didn’t do it to vex you.”
This brought him an intent look from the blue eyes so dark that they might as well be black, and a slight frown that was, strangely, apologetic. “I didn’t suppose you did,” Athos said. “I am fairly sure the three of you were just proceeding in the way you normally do.” He pressed his lips together, as if this were a great crime, then looked up at Aramis. “I told you not to go to the palace.”
“I had to,” Aramis said. “I had to speak to Hermengarde.”
“Alone? Are you perhaps courting Mousqueton’s girl-friend?”
“No,” D’Artagnan said, jumping into the conversation, because he had seen Athos and Aramis fight before, and it was not something he wished to see again. Porthos and Aramis fought all the time, the sort of amiable squabbling that caused one to think of a litter of newborn puppies in a basket, stepping all over each other and nipping at each other’s ears with no malice and no rancor—or memory of injury—held.
But perhaps because they were so highborn and trained to it, as great noblemen were, when Athos and Aramis argued it was all pale, drawn faces, and the sort of look that true enemies gave each other, not friends who merely disagreed on some point. Besides, this one fact was the sort of thing that would make Athos very irate, and an irate Athos could be an unbearable Athos. As the oldest and noblest of all of them, the erstwhile count held himself responsible not just for D’Artagnan, but for all of them. But his wish to protect them often demanded that they obey him, something that Aramis more than the others rebelled against. So he intervened hastily, trying to deviate the conversation. “No, but the armorer’s son wished to.”
“The armorer’s son?” The question came from both Porthos and Athos, at once.
D’Artagnan shrugged. “At least that is what the neighbors thought. That the armorer’s son, the young Langelier, wished to make Hermengarde his wife, while the armorer wished for Mousqueton to marry his daughter.”
“The armorer’s daughter?” Porthos asked, bewildered. “Is that what they told you? I cannot credit it. Mousqueton never told me.”
D’Artagnan was much too kind to explain that, given Porthos’s sometimes ambiguous relationship with the French language, it was quite possible that Mousqueton had indeed told him, but that the whole thing had got twisted in Porthos’s own mind into a conversation about some different subject—as perhaps the price of swords, or maybe even of fish. Instead he said, “I don’t know how seriously Mousqueton would have considered it, but the neighbors—at least the Gascon baker I spoke to—and his family, seemed to take it quite as a given.”
Athos was frowning at D’Artagnan. “I wish you wouldn’t speak,” he said. “You have bled a great deal.”
D’Artagnan, despite dizziness induced by blood loss and not improved by brandy, shook his head. “Oh, it is nothing,” he said. “Planchet, could you give me my shirt?” And then to his friend, “I just got slightly cut. Most of what appears to you to be blood comes from washing the wound and getting the water mixed with blood, so that there seems to be a great deal more of it than there ever was.”
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