On My Lady's Honor (All for one, and one for all) (16 page)

“You are Sophie, aren’t you?
 
Not Gerard, but his twin sister?”

“You are mistaken.
 
I am Gerard.”
 
Her voice was flat and lacked all conviction.

He looked at her in silence.
 
Her lip wobbled as she tried to face him down.
 
After a moment, she hung her head and looked away.
 
He spoke with utter certainty.
 
“You are not Gerard.”

She nodded, her face blank with desolation.
 
“I am not Gerard.”

“You are Sophie?”

“I am.”
 
Her voice was dead and cold.

“What happened to Gerard?”

Her eyes filled with tears.
 
“He died of the plague.”

Lamotte bowed his head in grief to have his suspicions so baldly confirmed.
 
“I guessed as much.”

He took her hand in his and held it in silence for some minutes as together they mourned for the death of the brother and friend they both had loved.
 
The touch of her hand was comforting in his grief.
 
Gerard had passed on to a better world, but he had left a part of him behind on earth.
 
He would cherish and protect Gerard’s sister as best he could.

After some moments, she wiped her eyes on her shirtsleeve and made a visible effort to control her grief.
 
“How did you find me out?”

The real question was how had he taken so long to find her out?
 
“You have been bothering me for weeks.
 
You were Gerard, and yet not Gerard.
 
I watched you and took note of everything you did, but I could not work out why you had changed so much.
 
Then when I picked you up in my arms this morning, it all became clear.
 
I knew then that you were no man.
 
I knew you were a woman.”

She raised her head again and looked at him with a spark of her usual fire.
 
“What are you going to do about it?”

He had been thinking about that since the moment he realized who she was.
 
“I will marry you, as I promised Gerard I would, and send you to safety in Burgundy as we had agreed.
 
My mother was looking forward to meeting my new wife.
 
She will take good care of you.
 
She has run the household by herself for many years, and will no doubt appreciate some help now that she is growing older.”

Sophie shuddered.
 
“I became a Musketeer so I would not have to marry a stranger and be sent off to exile in Burgundy.
 
I will not marry you now.”

He shrugged his shoulders.
 
She was not being reasonable.
 
What other kind of marriage could she expect?.
 
With no father to arrange matters for her, and after her time spent as a Musketeer, what other marriage could she possibly make?
 
She was lucky that he was contracted to her and his sense of honor obliged him to marry her.
 
She would find no other husband else.
 
“What else can you do?”

“I can be a Musketeer – as I am now.”

How unreasonable and impractical women could be sometimes.
 
“But you are a woman – you cannot survive the rigors of the barracks.”

She looked at him in silence for a moment.
 
“I already knew how to ride before I came to Paris,” she said at last.
 
“In the last few weeks I have learned how to fight.
 
I have worked every day until I collapsed on my bed with exhaustion.
 
I fought off a dozen louts bent on mischief last night, and escaped the guard sent to arrest the brawlers.
 
I wounded you in a fair fight and faced death with my eyes open.
 
Exactly what rigors can I not survive?”

He could not understand why she wanted to accept such hardship when an easier option was open to her.
 
“You are a woman.
 
You should be allowed to spend your time raising children and running a household, as other women do.
 
You should not have learned to fight.”

“You taught me how.”

He could not argue with that.
 
He was already regretting everything he had taught her.
 
“You are a woman, not a soldier.”

The look on her face would be enough to make a seasoned warrior quail.
 
“I will kill you before I let you disclose my secret.”

He believed her capable of killing him – had she not tried to once already? - but he would not fight a woman.

“My comrades believe me to be Gerard.
 
They will laugh at your claim.
 
I will deny that I am a woman.
 
I will fight you over the insult.”

She seemed to forget that he could easily prove his claim – she had shown him how the prior evening.
 
All it took was the sharp point of a sword to rip apart the lacings of a man’s breeches and he would not need to say word.
 
“You want to be a Musketeer that much?”

She nodded.
 
“I brought the plague into the household that killed Gerard and all my family.
 
I owe him the honor he would have received as a Musketeer.
 
I loved my brother, my twin, more than I loved anyone else in the world.
 
I will not let you rob him of that honor I will win in his name.”

He thought of how fondly Gerard had spoken of her.
 
Her love had been returned in good measure.
 
“Gerard loved you, too.”

Surprisingly, her eyes filled with tears at his words.
 
He would have thought that her heart was hardened beyond her sex.
 
He was glad to see that she was capable of some softer, more feminine emotions.
 
“I know he did,” she whispered.

A knock at the door heralded the arrival of the tub and plenty of pitchers filled with steaming hot water.

He saw the yearning in Sophie’s eyes as she looked at the water being poured into the tub.
 
“Bath time,” he said.

She glared at him again, but held her tongue until the landlady had left the room once more.
 
“You know that I cannot bathe with you here,” she said, not taking her eyes of the water as she spoke.
 
“It would not be seemly.”

For such an Amazon, she was surprisingly prudish.
 
“Are we not soldiers together?
 
Comrades-in-arms?”

“Very amusing.”

At least she had some shreds of modesty left in her.
 
He had been starting to wonder whether she was male in all but the shape of her body.
 
“I’ll find you some clean linen and leave you alone while you wash,” he said.
 
“You smell too bad to have in the house else.”

Once left alone with the steaming tub of water, Sophie could not get her clothes off fast enough.
 
How long had it been since she had immersed herself in water and gotten really clean?
 
She could not rightly remember.

All through the winter she had washed in cold water, not wanting to waste the firewood she gathered so painstakingly on luxuries like keeping clean.
 
She had spent all her energy on keeping herself warm and fed.

Her lodgings in Paris offered her no such luxury, either.
 
She had had to make do with a pitcher of lukewarm water grudgingly delivered to her each evening by her ill-tempered landlady.
 
She would never have dreamed of asking for an entire tub full of hot water.
 
She would not have gotten it even if she had asked, she was quite sure.
 
Her landlady would have swooned with the mere shock of being asked.

With an exhalation of pure delight, she tossed off the last of her filthy linen, pushed it into a pile with her foot and stepped into the deliciously warm water.

The blisters on her feet stung, as did the cuts on her hands, but she hardly cared.

Lamotte’s landlady had even brought soap – wonderful soap that smelled of heady purple lavender.
 
She ran the precious cake all over her body, rubbing it into a rich, foamy lather over her legs, her arms, her belly, her breasts.
 
There was even a long-handled scrubbing brush for her back.
 
She lathered the soap on to the brush and brushed her back vigorously, feeling every particle of dirt and grime dissolve away.

She sank down into the tub to wet her hair and lather it up with soap.
 
She’d cut her hair short before she had left the Camargue – it barely skimmed the top of her shoulders now, whereas before it had hung in a heavy plait nearly to her waist.
 
The soap ran into her eyes as she lathered her hair, making them water.

Finally, when she had scrubbed every inch of skin until it was as pure and white as the soul of a saint in Heaven, she lay back in the tub, relaxing in the cooling water.
 
Ah – it felt so good to be clean again.

Looking down at her nakedness in the tub, she could see how much her body had changed over the last year.
 
She had never been plump, but her body was hardened into leanness and a new firmness.
 
She ran her hands over her arms, marveling at the new bulges of muscle she found there – the bulges she had acquired herself through hard work.
 
Her belly was flatter than ever, with barely an ounce of fat covering her ribs, and her thighs were lean and muscular.
 
Her body was like that of a boy, she thought with a grimace.

All except for her breasts.
 
They, at least, made her look like a woman.
 
Indeed, they were her only saving grace.
 
Almost too big for her slight frame, even her winter of hardship had caused them to lose only a fraction of their fullness.

She took them in her hands, feeling the reassuring weight of them with a sense of joy.
 
She knew it would be more convenient for her not to have breasts at all – to be as flat-chested as a young girl.
 
Binding her breasts each morning was a chore she could well do without.
 
Still, as she looked at the pair of them, gloriously round and full, she could not regret a single ounce.
 
They alone reminded her that she was a woman.

She dunked herself once more in the water, reluctantly pulled herself out of the tub, and wrapped herself in the soft yellow towel she found waiting for her.

She eyed her pile of filthy clothes with distaste.
 
Now that she was clean, she felt like burning the lot of them.
 
Lamotte had been right.
 
They stank.

Her head still hurt but not as badly now, and her stomach had settled somewhat.
 
The bath had put her in a far more agreeable frame of mind all over.

Lamotte had left some linen out for her – a pair of cotton drawers that tied together at the waist, a white linen shirt and some white stockings.
 
There was also a pair of soft leather breeches – the finest quality, but decidedly too generous for her small frame.
 
She had nothing to bind her chest with except the dirty old wrappings she had been using before.
 
She could not use those.
 
She would have to let her breasts swing free.

She felt uncomfortably vulnerable half-dressed as she was in borrowed linen and too-big breeches.
 
Still, she was at least decent again.
 
She felt much more able to deal with Lamotte on his own ground.

She yawned.
 
Somehow or another she had to convince him not to reveal her secret.
 
She had no future as a woman.
 
If she were to leave the regiment, her brother would be undeservedly forgotten.
 

Besides, she was a Musketeer now, and a good one.
 
She had no desire to return to the confines of a woman’s life – all sewing and scouring and making gooseberry preserves.
 
How much more glorious it was to protect the King from his enemies!
 
How much more worthwhile she could be as a man that ever her life would be as a woman.
 

No, whatever he threatened, her mind was made up.
 
She was Gerard now, and she would not give up her new identity until her death.