Dying by the Sword

A Ghost Walking; A Musketeer’s Conscience; Where Athos Understands Porthos’s Difficulties

ATHOS left Rochefort’s office by way of a side door to the Palais Cardinal. He stumbled blindly past the guard there. And stopped.

Walking past him, down the darkened alley into which the door opened, was a ghost. It was a ghost he’d often seen in the dark, but never while wide awake. The ghost of the woman he’d once killed.

Tall, slim, though her heavy breasts and slim waist were disguised in a heavy cloak, Athos could tell she was indeed his late wife. Her carriage, the way she held her head, the pale blond hair that swept down to her waist-all of them belonged to Charlotte, Countess de la Fere.

Her name was on his lips. He wanted to pronounce it, to beg her pardon, to besiege her to look at him, to forgive him for having killed her. But she was so clearly there-solid, as solid as he was.

He thought, for a moment, madly, that perhaps Charlotte had had a sister-someone who looked exactly like her. But as she approached the door, without noticing him-not unbelievable, since he was wearing a musketeer’s attire and had his hat low over his eyes-she raised her hand to show the guard something. And on her hand, Athos saw a very small silver ring, with the glimmer of a pinkish stone. The ring that had once been his mother’s, the ring he had given his wife.

And the guard spoke to her, the guard answered her. He called her “milady” in English, as though she bore an English title, and she inclined her head to him as she went past.

Athos, pierced by regret, shock and confusion, remained standing where he was, long enough that the guard-a young man and, as such, brash and full of his own prerogatives and, after all, in his own territory-asked him if he needed anything more and suggested that perhaps he needed to move along.

Moving along was easy-at least physically. Athos allowed his feet to be set one in front of the other, insensibly carrying him away from the Palais Cardinal and towards his own lodgings, his mind benumbed. He’d hanged his wife. Of this he was as sure as he was sure he was alive, breathing, male, and Alexandre, Count de la Fere, now living under the penitent name of Athos. He had married the sister of his curate. She was well beneath his dignity, but so beautiful and seemingly so pure and pious that he couldn’t but fall in love with her.

A week after her elevation to the dignity, they’d been out hunting together. The countess, more eager in the chase, had spurred her horse ahead with such vigor, and charged with such intent blindness that she hit her head, hard, against the low branch of an overhanging tree, falling from her horse in the process.

Coming across his wife, to all appearances dead, the young count had panicked. With trembling hands, he’d cut her dress, to allow her to breathe more freely and perhaps recover consciousness.

They’d been married for a week. He’d enjoyed to the full the pleasures of his conjugal bed. He had not, however, seen his wife naked in the full light of day. Now, on a clearing on his lands, he saw her shoulder-and upon it, though small and very faded with cosmetics-was the brand of a criminal, the fleur-de-lis.

The shock and horror of that moment still made him reel, more than twenty years later. Branded criminals were adulterers, thieves, even murderers who had been branded between condemnation and execution, so that should they escape they would never be safe. It was the brand of infamy. [5]

Athos didn’t think-though it was hard to tell, looking back and trying to judge the feelings of that much younger man-he’d ever experienced anger. He didn’t think he’d ever moved beyond shock and throat-tightening horror. The wife whose position in life, by itself, would have caused Athos’s father to tell him he had besmirched the dignities of his life, had turned out to be yet far more unworthy and in a way that Athos couldn’t explain away by invoking her sweetness or her purity or even her beauty.

The sheer enormity of having picked, as the mother of his future children, a woman depraved enough to deserve that brand upon her shoulder had crashed about his head like a thunderstorm. He could only think of what people would say, should they ever find out. How, for the rest of his life, he would be pointed at and laughed at. How, should he ever marry again, his children too would be tainted with his dishonor, his mind-crushing miscalculation.

Unable to be angry, unable to think, he’d gotten a roll of rope that he kept in his saddle. He’d hanged his wife from a low hanging branch. He’d disposed of his affairs as though he had died. By the time evening fell, he was on his way to Paris with only Grimaud, who had once been his father’s valet and who had watched over Athos from earliest childhood.

Now, in the twilight of late winter, in Paris, twenty years after, he felt a headache forming. How can Charlotte be alive?

He’d hanged her. He remembered that. Though truth be told, he didn’t remember staying around and waiting to make sure she had indeed died. Such was his mental state at the time, that he thought he’d hanged her, then ridden away, disturbed by the last feel of her body in his arms.

Was it possible that as soon as he’d galloped away-if not before-the branch from which he’d hanged her had snapped? She’d been unconscious when he strung her up, so it was quite possible, though perhaps not probable, that she had survived a few minutes. Athos knew that what caused first damage when being hanged-at least when there was no substantial drop to ensure the executed broke his neck in the fall-was the frantic struggle against the rope. Being unconscious might have preserved her life longer, and if either branch or rope had broken shortly after…

He walked through the darkening streets. So suppose Charlotte had survived. Why had she not sought him out? If she were innocent-a possibility he had tormented himself with for so long-would she not have written to him, explained her case, made it known why she’d been branded and which enemy had managed it? If she truly loved him… Wounded though she might be by his having believed the worst about her, would she not have tried to reconcile with him?

Even now, even though he had reason to believe she was truly a criminal, wouldn’t he take her back in a second, if it could be proven to him that she hadn’t been guilty? Wouldn’t he?

He knew from the straining of his heart, from the sting of tears behind his eyes, that he would. But his wife was in town, and she’d not contacted him-she’d not, to Athos’s knowledge, made any effort to see him. In fact, though Athos had recognized her from the turn of the head, the way she stood, from the elegant slimness of her body and that moonlight-blond hair, she hadn’t seemed to notice him at all. She hadn’t seemed to recognize him.

Had he not haunted her mind as she haunted his? Not even in rage or wish for vengeance?

And she had been going into the Palais Cardinal, with every appearance of being well-known there. Surely, if that was true, the Cardinal would have told her about Athos, about who Athos was and what he was doing. She would know exactly how he lived, and anyone who knew him would have good reason to believe how remorse blighted his life.

So he would have to believe that she had not contacted him because in fact she did not love him and never had. He had been a rung on her climb, and his reaction to her perfidy had only meant that she would avoid him in the future.

It was the logical conclusion, and it should have made him feel better. He had, for so long, carried remorse over what he’d done, and doubt over whether it had been needed. Now his question had been answered and he was, in fact, fully justified. So why didn’t he rejoice? Why did he feel as though a band of iron had tightened about his heart?

Looking around, he realized his feet had brought him to his lodgings. He unlocked the door and climbed up to his room, having decided to find some of those bottles that he had hidden from Grimaud’s sometimes astringent searches of his belongings. That Grimaud thought his master drank too much, Athos understood. That the man-who had in large measure helped to raise Athos-thought himself entitled to make it harder for Athos to find liquor when his mind was taken with this fog of grief and hopeless mourning for what hadn’t been nor could ever be, Athos accepted. But he could not-he simply could not-allow Grimaud to keep him from drinking entirely.

Grimaud thought that if Athos didn’t drink, he would be awake and more aware of his surroundings. Athos would agree that was true. But he also knew, with absolutely unflinching certainty, that there was a great anger that lived just beneath the surface of his mind. That anger could be dulled and covered up by drinking. Without it, Athos wasn’t sure what he would do-what he would have done by now.

His lodgings were a tall, narrow slice of a bigger building. There were three floors and a basement, but each barely large enough to contain more than a room. It had a little landing at the bottom of the stairs. The upstairs floor was entirely Athos’s-consisting mostly of his bedroom, but also of a room decorated with an ancestral portrait and sword, and furnished with a number of comfortable chairs. Here he kept a few of the books he had packaged and brought with him, and a few other books he had acquired over the years. Books, like wine, could dull the pain and make him forget the anger, at least for a while. And here he and his friends often met, to discuss what they should do when faced with a dilemma.

On the bottom floor, there was a dining room, and the kitchen at which Grimaud’s labors often managed to produce meals that could have graced the kitchen back at La Fere -meals that were, more often than not, wasted on the master who would have preferred to drink his dinner.

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.”