Dying by the Sword

Where Monsieur Aramis Attempts to Investigate; Creditors with No Sense of Humor; It Is Better to Bless Than to Fight

ARAMIS, having left the tavern in good time, and finding himself, as of yet, devoid of followers, stood in a narrow alley, removing his gloves and slipping them back on, a trick he had when he was in something of a puzzle.

He could return to Athos’s house, but he could not imagine why he would be needed there. After all, the two most affected by alcohol were sleeping and, if he knew Porthos, the one least affected by alcohol would be snoring-and loudly too. This meant that Athos’s chamber was the last place to seek repose. As for the sitting room, he supposed he could sleep on a chair, or rolled upon his cloak on the floor. In fact, he’d slept in far worse conditions, when the King’s honor demanded that they march to battle. He remembered nights in arms, spent sleeping standing up, against a wall, under the pouring rain.

He had no wish to repeat that experience, though he was fairly sure he would, when next the kingdom embroiled itself in war with its neighbors over someone’s religion or someone else’s vacant throne. Until then, he had absolutely no interest in recollecting the hardships of battle by putting himself in discomfort.

Thoughts of his bed, its soft mattress and immaculate linen sheets, came to mind. Only he remembered the tone of voice in which Huguette had told about the woman, Charlotte. If she was one of the Cardinal’s minions; if she was even half so dangerous as Huguette believed… Well, it would be all up. Perhaps Aramis was becoming as afraid of shadows as his friends had been under the influence of alcohol, but he still couldn’t dispose of the conviction that the last place he should go was his lodgings. If she had asked for Athos’s life-and by extension their lives-as recompense, then heaven only knew what information the Cardinal might have given her, and what it might mean as far as their being safe in their own homes and in their own beds. And if he went home now, he wouldn’t even have the relatively ineffective Bazin as a guard.

And yet, he couldn’t imagine going to Athos’s house and crowding upon the already crowded floor or the even more crowded bed. He could, he thought, ask Grimaud for his bed, and he was fairly sure Grimaud would give it to him too. But Grimaud was old enough to be Athos’s father, which meant, in the end, that he was almost old enough to be Aramis’s grandfather. No good could come of this. Aramis could obtain his bed, but he would find himself unable to sleep for the remorse.

The other part of it was that he did not, very much, feel like sleeping. His body was charged with a sort of electrical energy, and he could not help but want to do something. Part of it was, he very much feared, that he wasn’t sure he could go home and sleep. Not with the idea that Athos’s wife was far worse than anything that Athos could represent with his story and that she wanted all their lives. If Huguette had not exaggerated-and though the girl could be fairly zany, in the past he had found her rather purple information, if anything, on the side of understated-then this woman was of the type that could not possibly have tolerated the injury that Athos had done her. He and everyone associated with him would be slated for death and this would most certainly include the friends that everyone knew spent most of every day with him.

Aramis was very much afraid even his well-appointed bed would not soothe him into sleep. And he certainly didn’t want to go back to Athos’s lodgings, wake his friend and tell him that the wife he’d thought dead was not only alive, but she was no common grade of criminal or fugitive. No, she was the sort of criminal or fugitive who could climb to the top rungs of society and destroy all those who stood in her way.

Aramis became aware that he was holding the tip of his tongue between his teeth, as though he were forcibly attempting to keep himself from telling the absent Athos the bad news. Which meant he definitely wasn’t ready to face his-who would be extremely hungover-friend. And he wasn’t ready to seek comfort in his bed, supposing there were no sharpened stakes waiting at his own doorstep, which at the moment was a somewhat unwarranted supposition.

So… So he would go to the armory, he thought. He had heard Porthos’s description, and D’Artagnan’s account of local gossip, but he was quite willing to bet that there was a nightlife in the area also, and that those abroad at that time would be more willing to talk to him than to Porthos or D’Artagnan. After all, people were more respectful of someone who was obviously a nobleman and wasn’t afraid to command their respect.

Of course, Athos could probably do the nobleman act better than Aramis, but Athos was more likely to scare them into silence than to get them to speak. Aramis they tended to think of as a fool and a dandy, and as such they viewed him as quite inoffensive.

With this happy thought, he set off at a fast clip towards the neighborhood of small close houses where the armory was. It had the advantage of being-he supposed-the very last place where anyone would look for him, just now. And it should keep Aramis happily occupied till dawn when perhaps he would be ready to brave his friends.

What he did not exactly count on was on finding the streets around the armory as empty as those of a ghost town, where everyone had suddenly died in the privacy of their houses, leaving the outside areas haunted only by shadows. Aramis took a moment to reason that, after all, he was used to musketeers and to taverns, to wenches who prowled the night and to courtiers. He was not used to people who actually woke up in the morning and worked. He supposed those would need to sleep at night.

Yet, unwilling to turn and go back to his friends, he, instead, walked around the armory. He tested the front door which, doubtless as a follow-up to Porthos’s interesting adventure, had been chained. Then he walked around, noticing how close the armory was to the house. Leaning one on the other, in fact. He wondered if there was an internal connecting passage and went along to poke his head in the narrow space between the two-so narrow, in fact, that it was hard to get his hand in between the two walls. Which he was in the process of doing when he heard a crunch of feet on gravel behind him. He started to turn around, but before he could someone or something swept his hat from his head. And something heavy hit him hard on the back of the head and the world went black.

He woke up in complete darkness and being jolted about. His first thought was that he was in a carriage, but judging from the jolts, he was being carried around in something that shook all over the place-which meant a not very good carriage, he supposed. He reached up, only to find out that if it was a carriage, it was a very small one, since he was confined, in a sitting position, with his back bent over forward, in a space barely large enough to contain him. A frantic feeling of the space around him disclosed that they had taken his sword and-apparently-his hat as well.

His first, terrifying thought was that he was in a coffin. But if he were in a coffin, the coffin was still being carried around and not confined in the ground. And besides, Aramis had never seen a coffin the shape his enclosure appeared to be-fairly high and rectangular at the base, and covered over by a domed space.

Because his head hurt like blazes, it took him a moment for the shape to connect in his head to the only thing it could be-a storage trunk, of the sort used to deposit tools and clothes, or anything else. It smelled faintly of sap, so it must be fairly new and made of wood. And, now that his eyes were accustomed to the darkness, Aramis could tell that there was a small crack all around, through which light and air came. There was also a hole which was clearly a keyhole.

Aramis peeked through this keyhole and to his shock saw light of morning and also what appeared to be a swath of countryside. And someone’s back, dressed in rough homespun. He was being taken somewhere in an open cart, by men dressed in homespun. Probably men who did not know him and whom he did not know, though it was always possible, of course, that they were wearing disguises.

In Aramis’s mind, he had a view of the trunk, with him inside it, being dropped into a hole in the ground and covered over. That, doubtless, would be a solution to his having penetrated some portion of De Chevreuse’s conspiracy. Perhaps to other things too. Perhaps the whole thing with the armorer was that it was part of the same conspiracy. It would explain the guards’ presence on the scene so soon after the murder and their eagerness to take Mousqueton in. In fact, as far as that went, it explained a lot. Including why Aramis was now inside a trunk.

Well, he might in the end finish his life in a hole in the ground while still alive, but he would be damned if he allowed them to do it while he was still and well behaved.

Raising his fist, he pounded hard on the lid of the trunk. “Hey,” he called. “Hey, you above, let me out.”

“Ah, woke up, have you, sleeping beauty?” A rough voice, with a plebeian accent, answered him. “Well and good, now be quiet and no harm will come to you.”

“Why should I be quiet?” Aramis said, pounding on the lid again. “What are you doing to me?”

“You’ll see,” the man said. “And soon enough. Let’s just say you’ll be put in a safe place, from which you’ll never get out, not in a thousand years.”

The image of the hole in the ground, and dirt being shoveled in on top of him made Aramis shiver. “There are no places safe enough,” he said. “My friends will come for you, you’ll see.”

“Oh, don’t be going on about your friends. Rest assured they will be taken care of, and they won’t be coming for nobody when we’re done with them.”

Aramis, despite himself, heard a moan escape between his lips. “You’ll find them harder to deal with than you think,” he said, in a low voice, from which he could barely keep the sting of fear. Oh, sure, Athos, Porthos, D’Artagnan were all able men and capable of turning the world upside down at sword point. They were, however, as vulnerable as all other men to being taken in, fooled, cajoled and/or destroyed by a woman’s wiles.

Unless he much mistook his understanding of the man, and Aramis was not in the habit of misunderstanding anyone, Athos was still in love with the frightening creature. And as for D’Artagnan and Porthos, he would not give them a chance in a hundred of withstanding the charms of any female who approached them the right way and played the victim. They were even quite likely to overlook the fact that she looked uncommonly like Athos’s lost and found wife.

The response to his threat was a chuckle. “Oh, good with a sword, your friends are,” the man said. “But they are not very good with their minds. Trying to find you would require that they think and that, I fear, between drinking and wenching, they won’t find much time to do.”

Aramis considered shouting back that they didn’t drink that much, but then again, he’d left two of them behind in a profound drunken stupor, so that would not work. And as for wenching… well…

He thought of the wench most likely responsible for this-for it wasn’t to be supposed that Athos’s wife by herself would come up with the brilliant idea of capturing and boxing up Aramis. Not for a moment. It was more likely that she would think of boxing up Athos. And probably setting fire to the box afterwards. He rolled his eyes. So the person responsible for this would more than likely be De Chevreuse, who wanted Aramis out of her affairs. Did she truly intend to have her henchmen drive him to the countryside and bury him alive?

Shallow and frantic though their connection was, Aramis could not help but think that he could not possibly mean so little to her that she would want him to die such a horrible death. Perhaps she didn’t know. He knocked on the top of the box, this time more politely. “Pardon me, but does Marie know what you mean to do to me? Did she give you orders?”

“What?” the man said, and banged what seemed like a gigantic fist atop the box. “You dare use her name? All while you’re intending to marry your highfalutin hussy, you dare use my sister’s name? Let me tell you, my boy, that though she gave us no orders, as you presume, she will be more than happy to know you will not return to the world and the society of men until you do right by her. And pay back what you owe.”

“Beg your pardon?” Aramis said, hearing his voice squeak with alarm. “Your… sister?” He wasn’t aware of Marie Michon, aka De Chevreuse, having brothers who concerned themselves in her affairs. Truth be told, if they did, they would be the busiest swords in France, just keeping her name from being stained by rumors.

“Beg my pardon all you want. It is Marie’s pardon you’ll be begging in the end, and on your knees too. And don’t think you’ll convince us to let you out by using that well-bred voice, Pierre. We know where you come from. We know how you grew up. You’re not going to impress us by dressing all in fashionable velvets and by speaking as though you were born to rule a kingdom.”

Pierre! Aramis might be many things, but Pierre certainly he was not. Porthos’s given name was Pierre, but Aramis would need to be insane to think anyone had mistaken him for Porthos, even on a dark night and while his face was obscured.

No. He’d been between the armory and the house, as he would have been if he’d been coming out of the inside, and about to go into the armory. As if he were the new owner of the armory, the son of the murdered armorer. A vague memory of D’Artagnan’s account of the gentleman emerged. Something to do with his being in love with Hermengarde, doubtless the highfalutin hussy.

This being that way, and these men obviously intent on making Pierre marry someone by the name of Marie, this meant… That they weren’t going to bury Aramis. In fact, they were hardly likely to hurt him. And when they opened the box and saw his face in the full light of day, they would have to let him go.

But when would they open the box? He put his eye to the keyhole again, in time to see a swath of trees go by, at creeping speed, on the other side of what appeared to be a country road. From the daylight it would be nearly noon. If they’d come away this slowly, it was possible he wasn’t that far away from Paris. But how far away did he need to be to make it devilishly difficult for him to get back?

And he must get back. He absolutely must. His friends must be warned that the Cardinal had a new minion, and one who would be looking for their blood.