Dying by the Sword

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.”

Athos looked at Aramis over D’Artagnan’s head, and because there didn’t seem to be hostility in that look, D’Artagnan didn’t feel obliged to speak up. He had the impression that Aramis had shrugged. “It is bad enough,” he said, in a low voice. “As you saw, the cut is very deep and, in fact, he bled a great deal, in the palace gardens, before we could stop it. You must not be so alarmed though. I stopped most of the bleeding there. The very little he bled here can’t have made his case much worse.”

And Athos, who appeared thunderstruck and at a loss for words, shook his head. He looked at D’Artagnan allowing, for just a moment, a glimmer of humor into his severe countenance. “All of you, my friends, tempt me to say, with Monsieur de Treville, that such noble men shouldn’t risk themselves in such foolish ways.”

Aramis gave a soft chuckle, echoed by D’Artagnan himself, and Porthos snorted in amusement. “He only says that when he is pleased with us, usually because we have risked ourselves in foolish ways. Only let us be taken by the guards of the Cardinal without a fight, or let us do the prudent thing and abandon a scene of trouble, and he will proclaim us the most scurvy and worthless men who ever lived. And he will give us no quarter.”

Athos inclined his head, but the tension in his bearing seemed to have broken. D’Artagnan, who was starting to read his friends very well indeed, suspected that Athos had come in furious at something and that this anger had colored the scene that had greeted him. Ire mingled with worry had made him, for a moment, wish to pick a quarrel with any of them, so that he could either justify his annoyance or stop worrying. And Aramis would have risen to the bait.

But perhaps his own confusion had helped or perhaps Athos’s sense of humor had reasserted itself. He sighed, in exasperation. “Let’s suppose we take this from the beginning and one at a time, then. D’Artagnan, am I to understand that you gathered information from a Gascon family?”

D’Artagnan nodded. “I was starting to think I couldn’t do it at all,” he said. “You know… lie to someone. But this bakery was very busy and it smelled and sounded like home.” He shrugged. He had wanted to come to Paris and seek his fortune. He had been blessed indeed to make friends with the best of the musketeers within days of his arrival. He would be the worst of wretches if he let his friends know how often or how much he missed the province of his birth. “So I went in and the baker invited me to dinner, and… well… I heard the neighborhood’s gossip. I would doubtless have heard more, but there was this big eruption of noise from the armory, and I… well… I went in and found Porthos.”

Athos’s observant eyes looked towards his larger friend. “And you, Porthos?”

“Well…” Porthos took a deep breath. “I remembered to take a candle, but I totally forgot to procure some melons.”

Aramis snorted. “Porthos! Melons are not in season, and what can your lack of melons have to do with your making a racket in the armorer’s? What were you even doing in the armorer’s?”

“Well… I’d heard that Mousqueton had lost consciousness after being hit a glancing blow by a hammer that fell from the high rack over the forge.”

“And you realized, as I did,” Athos said, “that you had been in that shop a lot of times, that you knew the ceiling was very high, and that you didn’t remember seeing any hammers hanging from the rack.” He looked at Porthos with something approaching benevolence. “But with your turn of mind, you needed, of course, to go and test the idea.”

“Well… I didn’t drop hammers on my own head.”

Aramis, to D’Artagnan’s side, rolled his eyes. “Something for which we should be very grateful indeed. But why did you need to make noise?”

Porthos shrugged and Athos shook his head, and asked him, “Did any of the swords fall? Or the hammer if you managed to hang it there?”

Porthos looked relieved and shook his head, and Athos nodded. “And that brings us to you, Aramis. You went to the palace and you spoke to Hermengarde, which brings us to…”

“She said she… she had decided to marry Mousqueton,” he said, lamely, not wishing to discuss Hermengarde’s possible impending motherhood with the servants present.

“Hermengarde is with child, sir,” Grimaud said, and gave Athos a sideways glance. “Or at least Mousqueton believed so and believed the child was his.”

D’Artagnan, by the corner of his eye, saw Porthos pale and sit down. “With child?” he said. “This too, Mousqueton did not tell me.”

“He would not,” Grimaud said, and shook his head. “Not until he had made up his mind what to do and worked the plan over with Hermengarde, which he had just done when…” He shrugged. “You see, they’ve all of them”-he looked at Planchet and Bazin in a corner of the kitchen-“gotten used to coming to me for advice. Because… because I am older, and I have raised children.”

Athos nodded at this. “So he came to you for advice?” “Certainly, when he had his letter. And he wanted to know what I thought and how Monsieur Porthos would accept it if Mousqueton were to get married.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That Monsieur Porthos was the kindest of all masters, and that he was not likely to take it amiss if Mousqueton married, provided between the two of them they found some way to support themselves and their child. And Mousqueton, you know, sir, the last thing he wanted was for his lover to be forced to give up their child or to leave him at the door of some church, to be raised out of charity.”

“No,” Porthos said. “That’s how Mousqueton himself was raised, and I would have guessed that he would endure any number of trials to assure that his child didn’t suffer a similar childhood. But… How is Hermengarde taking all this?”

“I told her,” Aramis said, his shoulders squared, his face resolute, “that we would do all we could to ensure Mousqueton’s freedom.”

D’Artagnan noted a look from Athos. “And what in this made you believe you were the target of this attack? What could possibly have crossed your mind to lead you to think-”

Aramis shook his head. “You know I have a new… friend.”

“If by that you mean a new seamstress, or a new niece of your theology professor, or whatever you’re calling it these days, yes, I am well aware of that,” Athos said, drily. “Else how to explain the disturbing profusion of perfumed note paper arriving at all hours.”

By the corner of his eye, D’Artagnan watched Bazin cross himself. Since he knew what Aramis’s servant, whose greatest ambition in life was to become a lay brother in whatever order his master chose to serve, thought of his master’s carnality, it was a confirmation of Athos’s guess.

Aramis only nodded. “Well… I have… something of that nature.” He stopped, suddenly, and looked around, with a worried eye. “Can we speak of this in private?”

“In the kitchen?” Athos said. “Not likely. And surely you’re not suggesting you don’t trust our servants. We are, after all, fighting for the life of their friend.”

“Yes, that is all very well,” Aramis said. “And I am sure each and every one of them is more than willing to do what must be done for our brave Mousqueton. However…” He paused, and hesitated. “There are dangers attendant to this situation, dangers, shall we say, that do not proceed from the murder and do not devolve upon Mousqueton alone.”

Perhaps it was, D’Artagnan thought, the return of Aramis’s habitual roundabout manner of speech that made Athos’s lips go taut once more. But D’Artagnan knew this could not be allowed. “I believe,” he said, in a tired tone, “what Aramis means is that there is some danger attaching to his seamstress. I’m not going to speculate, but it could be anything, from an irate husband to… something more serious. We know how high Aramis-who is, after all, so punctilious about his clothes-looks for a seamstress who can sew a straight seam, do we not? Is it so strange that he would not wish to speak of it in front of our servants, not because he doesn’t trust them, but because he believes the knowledge could bring danger to them?”

Exhausted by his long speech, he leaned back against the edge of the table, in time to see a grateful smile from Aramis. “Thank you, D’Artagnan,” Aramis said, in a voice that revealed D’Artagnan was not by any means the only one to notice that Athos was more tightly wound than normal. “You have, as usual, made light in the dark.”

D’Artagnan bowed slightly, but Athos was frowning. “Well, then let us adjourn upstairs, to my sitting room, to discuss the matter. I…” He frowned more intensely, as though the admission were being torn from him reluctantly. “I too have something that I should discuss and which is perhaps too serious to allow innocents to be involved in.”

“Planchet, my shirt,” D’Artagnan said again, imperiously. The boy had been holding his shirt the whole while, looking at it with an expression of utter dismay on his freckled face.

“It’s all over blood, sir,” Planchet said, lifting the offending garment. “As is your doublet.”

“Grimaud,” Athos said, “if you would be so kind as to help Monsieur D’Artagnan to my chamber, and offer him any of my shirts or doublets he would care to take.”

D’Artagnan felt a sudden relief, for he had been afraid they’d need to send Planchet home for replacement clothes and he, himself, was starting to think that there was some danger involved in their going out of doors alone. As far as he could determine, each of the three of them had assumed he was the culprit in the fracas in the palace gardens. And Athos, himself, seemed to have some secret.

He allowed Grimaud to lead him out of the kitchen and help him up the stairs. Grimaud assisted him with small movements, a touch on the elbow, a support of the arm-all without seeming to, D’Artagnan noted and wondered how many times Grimaud had escorted his drunken and querulous master this way. And how many times he must have lead Athos up these stairs when Athos was far more wounded than D’Artagnan was now.

All of them, D’Artagnan knew, worried about Athos. Aramis might be the only one who worried for his soul, but Porthos and D’Artagnan spent plenty of time musing on the state of his body. As, doubtless, did the devoted and absolutely loyal Grimaud, who now led D’Artagnan to a room far better appointed than should have been expected of any musketeer living in Paris. Most of the furnishings there declared as loudly as words that they’d been brought back from Athos’s ancestral domains.

Grimaud extracted a linen shirt-much finer than anything D’Artagnan had ever worn-and an old-fashioned and worn doublet from one of the clothing presses, and clucked at something within the press. D’Artagnan, who had heard the sound of glass or ceramic just before that, looked at Grimaud, and their gazes met in perfect understanding.

As Grimaud helped D’Artagnan into the shirt-a little long, but not much larger than D’Artagnan’s own, or at least not large enough to look ridiculous, since D’Artagnan was much more sturdily built than the muscular but spare to thinness Athos-D’Artagnan said, “Has… has your master been suffering a great deal from his old trouble?”

Grimaud sighed. “Not so much, sir. Now and again though the… since you joined their group, the troubles of a different sort have kept him from brooding on his own quite so much as he used to. And with Monsieur le Comte, you know, it is memories and… and the thought of what might have been that brings his trouble about.”

“You mean that having found himself faced with murders has been good for my friend?”

Grimaud inclined his head. “I’ve thought so. There is nothing, you know, like a little intrigue and a lot of danger in the present to keep the past at bay. Only today, when he came in, Monsieur D’Artagnan, I will confess that I looked into his eyes and I thought…”

“You thought?”

“I thought he looked as though he’d seen a ghost.”