Dying by the Sword

Where Monsieur le Comte Receives Several Surprises; The Difference Between a Roasted Chicken and a Live Countess; Athos Loses his Battle with Reality

BY the time Athos got home, he could have truthfully said that not much was on his mind, other than his desire for some dinner and for the comfort of his bed. He was telling himself he needed to shave, and wondering if he should do it now or leave it till tomorrow morning. His beard and moustache, which he wore carefully trimmed and shaped, depended for their look on his keeping the rest of his face hair free, which he was sure it wasn’t now.

If he had been in an introspective mood, he would have admitted that another part of him was thinking of the duchess’s soft breasts pressed against his chest, of the feeling of her, light and lively, in his hands, of the taste of her mouth against his, of the sheer joy of their kiss. But he shut out any such thoughts and told himself that if he dwelt on them it would only mean he would turn his feet towards the palace once more. And then, where that led no one knew, save that Athos was not one to share, and he was not one to take kindly to his ladylove exposing herself to danger. So their affair would be of very short duration and end with his heart broken.

Instead, he walked along and thought that he would have to ask Grimaud to ask of Planchet to make sure his master returned Athos’s doublet and shirt. Or if not, Athos would have to procure new ones, an activity he found so distasteful that he tended to avoid doing it more than once a decade.

In this mood, divided, he reached his lodgings and unlocked the door and went in. The sight of Grimaud standing in the small vestibule was so unexpected that, for a long moment, Athos did not realize he was there. And when he did, it was to blink, bewilderedly. “Grimaud!” he said. “What has happened?”

The second because his old retainer had his arms crossed, and his legs planted, as though ready for a battle. His eyes were blazing and his face pale, and he looked altogether as though he were preparing to challenge Athos on something, which was always a very strange and rare event. The poor man submitted to using sign language and uttering not a word for months at a time, when Athos was in such a state of mind that the sound of a human voice disturbed him. He submitted to leaving behind the estate in which he had a good many friends, and even more sycophants. All for the sake of Athos.

But now the light of battle was in his eyes, and he was treating Athos as if Athos had never left behind his dignity, which was always a very bad sign. “If you think I’m going to allow you to cede your bed to your friends night after night, and sleep all cramped up in some corner, or worse-I know you!-rolled up on a cloak on the floor, let me tell you, milord, it will not do. And as for Bazin telling me that his master has been out doing holy work, that won’t be believed either. Bazin can pray all he wants to, and lard all his conversations with Latin, but you won’t get me to believe that Monsieur Aramis can come in smelling of liquor and with straw matted in his hair, and talking about dangerous chickens and have been out in the service of the Lord.”

For Grimaud this speech was an epic oration, comparable to other men going on for hours on end, and yet Athos could make neither head nor tail of it.

He frowned at his servant. “Grimaud, I do not have the pleasure of understanding you at all. What happened, and why am I the bout of your wrath?”

“Monsieur Aramis. He came in dead drunk, smelling of wine, and behaving in such a way… well… he could not stay on his own two feet, and our only choice was to strip him to his shirt and put him in your bed. But if you think I intend to let you pass another unquiet night-”

“Oh, now I see,” Athos said. “Your concern is for how I shall sleep, because in your mind I am still the sickly boy whom you watched for through the long nights. But Grimaud, I’m an adult now, and I would thank you-” His mind had caught up with his mouth, and it was informing him rather urgently of something that Grimaud had clearly said. He looked at the weather-beaten face of his servant, and he took a deep breath. “Grimaud, did you say that Monsieur Aramis told you to beware of dangerous chickens?”

Grimaud glared. “He said that she was intending to kill us all, and that if the fire caught all the chickens would be roasted, or something like that, and then, when he became more or less conscious again, as we were putting him to bed, he informed me with the utmost urgency that the chickens might set fire to the sun and kill us all. What was I to make of all this, pray?”

Athos almost chuckled. He couldn’t help it. He’d seen Aramis drunk quite a few times, in their years of friendship. But what operated there is that he’d never yet seen Aramis drunk when he, himself, hadn’t been drunk. And, in company, when Aramis had got drunk, he had usually amused himself in long arguments with Porthos-or occasionally Athos, though considering that Athos tended to go monosyllabic when drunk, that was a hard feat to achieve-about theology or the manufacture of drinking cups, or whatever else struck his fancy. At the end of it, Aramis would do his best to duel someone, only by that time he was so far gone, he couldn’t take his sword out of its sheath. “So Monsieur Aramis is drunk,” he said. “Given what we’ve gone through in the last few days I can hardly make a comment on that. Besides, last night, it was Monsieur Aramis and Monsieur Porthos who put me to bed.”

“But didn’t strip you down. They didn’t even take your sword.”

Athos, thinking that this was true and also that it betrayed a naivete as touching as it was dangerous, said, “Yes. I daresay they were a bit gone into their cups, as well.” He shook his head. “Don’t worry about it, Grimaud. The bed is large enough to accommodate half a dozen people, and at least a normal person and Monsieur Porthos. It is more than large enough for myself and Monsieur Aramis.”

But Grimaud’s arms remained crossed on his chest. “It’s just no use at all thinking that I will countenance your spending another disturbed night, because I won’t. When you stop sleeping, it is always the beginning of a troubled time, and I have no intention of allowing you to do that again.”

There was this thing about being raised by a male, Athos thought-which in many ways, between his sickly mother and his unbending father, he had been-that should frighten everyone. Mother lions could be scary, but father lions, who had condescended to take notice of their offspring, and devote time to them, could be terrifying.

Still, he knew what lay at the back of it, and he was sure that over the years he’d given the poor man quite a few sleepless nights himself. So, instead of protesting, he put his hand on Grimaud’s shoulder, gently. “Don’t worry. I can let Monsieur Aramis sleep here. I don’t know what he meant by chickens being after him, but I am sure it is nothing but one of those drunken alarms that mean nothing. He will wake tomorrow, and he will be in a better mood, and then we will talk to him and find out what he meant. And meanwhile his taking up a quarter or less of my bed will not disturb me.”

“He is snoring fit to wake the saints,” Grimaud said. “He is snoring louder than the final trumpet.”

“Well, then I shall snore in competition with him,” said Athos, feeling like he might very well do that, because his late night the night before, the alcohol ingested, and the emotional shocks of the last few hours had all dropped on his shoulders like a heavy burden, making him totter. The duchess had reminded him that he would not see thirty again and, right then, he felt it. He said, “But first, if you could procure me some broth, or a slice of meat, or something. Just to take the edge off the hunger. I don’t think I can sit through an entire dinner just now.” At any rate, he had a dread of sitting alone and eating at that polished table, where Grimaud would attend to him as though he were still the Count de la Fere in his ancestral estate.

Grimaud’s mouth grew thinner and harder. “I have,” he said, speaking while barely decompressing his lips, “prepared you a chicken, and a soup of mutton and lentils, and a sweet of…”

Oh, there would be no use arguing with this. When Grimaud took the time to prepare a full meal-when they had enough money to warrant preparing a full meal-there was no gainsaying him. Athos sighed. “Very well. Bring me water to my room, so I can at least wash my hands and face.” Because sitting in estate while covered in dust and feeling like he still smelled of his drunken sweat-which was true-would be insupportable. He must at least wash his hands and face, comb his hair and change his shirt.

He was in the middle of combing his hair, when Grimaud came up and, silently, his lips still compressed, poured warm water into the basin in the room. Athos splashed it on his face, and washed his face and neck, his hands and arms, and turned to find Grimaud holding out a clean shirt for him.

The servant left while Athos was tidying his doublet over his shirt, which was the first time that Athos dared cast a look at his friend, on his bed-mostly because he was afraid doing so while Grimaud was there would have caused some withering comment about straw or chickens.

Aramis was indeed snoring, something else that Athos was not aware Aramis could do-and they had often shared lodgings on campaign and in travel. Never before had he seen Aramis lying like this, faceup, his mouth slightly open, snoring in loud, prolonged bursts. Were it not for the stubble, glimmering on his face by the light of the five candles that stood on the nearby table, and for the creases around his eyes that spoke of recent dissipation, Aramis might, in fact, have looked like a young child.

The light of the candles was also more than enough for Athos to catch sight of a few bits of straw stuck to Aramis’s normally impeccable hair. What had he been doing? Out tumbling farm girls? While he had the duchess? And could bed her at will or close to it?

Athos shook his head, pityingly. “Ah, Aramis. You don’t know what you are ignoring.”

And on that, Aramis half sat up and stared at Athos with bewilderingly intent green eyes. “She means to kill us all,” he said. “She has asked for our heads as her reward.”

In a moment of sick feeling, his stomach lurching within him, Athos felt as though Aramis were answering his innermost thoughts and warning him against the Duchess de Chevreuse. He took a step forward. “Who? Who means to kill us all, Aramis? To whom did she ask for our heads?”

Aramis looked at him, bewildered. Or rather, did not look at him, but at something that appeared to be on a parallel line with Athos’s face, but possibly some miles distant. “The chickens,” he said, very firmly. “And the goats.” He made a gesture with his hand, flat, palm downward, and swept it from left to right, in a circular half motion, as though indicating all the expanse of the room, or possibly of the Earth. “All of it in the service of the Cardinal.”

And then, he fell back on his back, and resumed snoring. Athos smiled and shook his head. His verdict to Grimaud, as Grimaud served him some sort of compote, which he said was “made from pears from the north orchard, sent to me by my daughter, for you, milord,” was, “Monsieur Aramis is drunk as a wheelbarrow and you know, Grimaud, if you wish me to sleep well, you might not insist I sleep on that bed.”

Grimaud narrowed his eyes and made his lips very thin indeed, but, before he could start on his tirade, Athos sighed. “It’s no use, Grimaud. We can move him, but if we put him on one of the chairs, or even on the floor, he’ll not sleep well, and will be more likely to get up and get into some mischief than otherwise. So, I recommend we leave him on my bed, and you can take my thickest cloak and make me a sleeping area in the sitting room.”

Grimaud didn’t say anything, but the glare of his eyes said everything. Notwithstanding which, when Aramis was done drinking a small glass of brandy after his dinner, he found that Grimaud had in fact made him an admirable sleeping area, with cloaks and cushions and who knew what else. He stripped down to his shirt, threw clothes and sword over the back of a nearby chair, and climbed into it, too tired to care if by rights he should have had his bed or not. He was bone tired-weary with a weariness that mere physical tiredness couldn’t explain.

For what seemed like a few minutes, he was blessedly, happily unconscious. Only to be brought awake again, by loud, repeated pounding on the door. From the sound of it, it seemed very much like it would be Porthos. Athos, hearing Grimaud hastening down the stairs and calling out, “I’m coming, I’m coming, wait,” assumed that he could go back to sleep.

He relaxed in his nest of cloaks and cushions, and started to close his eyes again. Which is when, upon his sleeping ears, there erupted the oddest sound in the world-Grimaud, yelling at a stranger. Or at least the words sounded like they were directed at a stranger. “Get away you hussy, you strumpet. This is a respectable household and we want none of your tricks.”

In Athos’s recently awakened mind, these words mingled with images of the duchess and more alarming images of his long-lost wife, and he realized he was bolt upright and moving, as he ran down the stairs, towards the front door.

The woman at the front door could not be the duchess, she was not rounded enough. And she could not have been Charlotte. She was much too short. A short, flat little woman, with disproportionately broad shoulders, attired in a dark red dress that would be in the latest fashion, except for the fact that it was much too long on her, and broad and narrow in all the wrong places. She looked, in fact, not so much like a strumpet, as like someone who wore another woman’s discards. And the bits of scraggly black hair that peeked from underneath her broad brimmed hat with its veil didn’t help at all.

She was bravely resisting Grimaud’s attempts at pushing her out and, considering her previous pounding on their door, Athos had to consider the possibility that this was, after all, if not a hussy, at least a madwoman. He wasn’t sure which one he would have liked better. And then the woman advanced a foot, and Athos realized that she was barefoot.

He was about to step forward and intervene, when Grimaud, reaching widely, managed to knock the intruder’s hat off. His words of “Monsieur D’Artagnan” hit Athos’s ear at the same time as the sight of that pale face, those staring, horrified dark eyes, the hair standing all on end, the two-day growth of scraggly eighteen-year-old beard, all of it above the satin and silk of a very expensive dress.

The sound of his own laughter, ringing out, surprised Athos, but not enough to make him stop. In fact, once he had started laughing, he who rarely indulged in display of emotion of any kind, could not stop. His laughter rang out louder and louder, while he sat down on the steps-his knees gone too weak to support him-and tears ran down his face in rivulets.

He calmed down sometime later, with D’Artagnan grasping him by the arm and saying, “Athos, for the love of God, you must listen to me.”

He looked up at the boy’s face, and read the very real terror in it. Looking for a handkerchief in his sleeve and not finding it, because he was not wearing his doublet but solely his shirt left loose to fall almost to his knees, he wiped his streaming eyes and soaked face to the sleeve itself. “Yes, D’Artagnan,” he managed, swallowing to maintain his composure. “You must forgive me, it was your looking so male and…”

Grimaud had closed the front door and now went by them, on the stairs, cleaving to the opposite wall. The look he gave Athos made Athos aware that if he got his sleep any more disturbed, it was, after all, Athos’s fault in allowing his insane musketeer friends the liberty of the house.

Athos looked up and managed to keep his countenance-barely. The boy’s fear made that easier. It wasn’t something to sport with. “What happened? How come you here, in this attire.”

“It is the only clothes I could find on my way out of her bedchamber. She was after me with a dagger.” D’Artagnan shuddered.

“She?” Athos asked.

“Milady. Your… wife.”

Athos felt as if an ice-cold hand had clutched at his innards, but all he could say was, “I see.” And then, louder, “Grimaud, if you could bring some water to my room. I’ll help Monsieur D’Artagnan dress, while we speak.” And, ignoring Grimaud’s mumbled complaints, as he came towards them on the stairs again, Athos helped his friend up the stairs to his room. The only reason D’Artagnan needed help at all was that he appeared to have been running barefoot through shards of clay. “Some tiles that fell from a roof,” he said.

By the time Grimaud had come back with warm water in a jug, Athos had found D’Artagnan some underwear, and was digging through one of his clothes presses for a shirt. He didn’t see any point giving the boy doublet and hose now, since he would, doubtless, be going to bed. “Here,” he said, extending a shirt to D’Artagnan, only to find it rudely ripped off his hands by Grimaud, who went to the trunk and brought out quite a different shirt. “We can send for your clothes in the morning. I assume you left Planchet in your lodgings?”

D’Artagnan nodded. And added, half under his breath, “I hope he’s safe.”

And Athos looked up, helplessly, at Grimaud, who huffed. “I’ll go, and take Bazin and collect the boy. And we’ll get you your clothes for tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Grimaud,” Athos said.

“But first I’m going to bring you another jug of water, Monsieur D’Artagnan, and don’t you dare put those feet on Monsieur Athos’s bed. You left a trail of mud all up the stairs and across the floor.”

After Grimaud left to collect more water, Athos said, “You must forgive him. He’s anxious lest I should be disturbed. I have a feeling this is a truly bad night for him to feel this way.”

D’Artagnan gave him a serious look. “I’m afraid so,” he said, and proceeded to pour into Athos’s ears a tale as chilling as it was unbelievable.

“You believe,” Athos said, “that she set it up so you came upon her just as the ruffians appeared to be threatening her? Why? And how?”

“The how wouldn’t be difficult,” D’Artagnan said. “I suspect she has had us followed. If she is one of the Cardinal’s creatures, this can’t be wholly difficult.”

“No,” Athos said, but still felt the cold, clamped on his guts.

Water was delivered, and Athos told D’Artagnan, “I believe it would be best if you laid down and attempted to sleep. I don’t know how well you may do next to Aramis, since he alternates between snoring and telling people about the danger of chickens.” He smiled a little at D’Artagnan’s expression. “I assure you it’s true, and I assure you I have no more idea what he means than do you. I’m sure he means something, at least in his own mind, but what that might be, I cannot tell you. He is, needless to say, drunk.”

D’Artagnan looked at the blond musketeer curiously, as he snored, faceup on the bed. “It seems like something Aramis… I mean, it doesn’t seem like him.”

“Indeed,” Athos said. “And after your story, I’m beginning to wonder whether he did in fact get drunk or whether something was added to his food or drink, and, in that case, what that might be.”

He helped D’Artagnan rinse his feet, and then saw him climb onto the bed, on the opposite side of Aramis, before he headed out the door.

“I might yet come and try to sleep on a chair,” D’Artagnan said.

“You’re welcome to,” Athos answered and was, by that time, so tired that he couldn’t ever remember getting to the sitting room or crawling into his mound of cushions and cloaks.

He could however remember being startled awake by a loud knocking. For a long time, it seemed, he lay there, wishing that Grimaud would answer. But after a while, it occurred to him Grimaud couldn’t answer, since Grimaud had gone to fetch D’Artagnan’s Planchet. He grabbed a candle, which he’d forgotten to blow out, from the little table in the corner, reached for his sword, and pulling it from its sheath, held it in his hand, as he went down the stairs and threw the door open.

To find Porthos, holding what seemed to be a covered clay dish, staring at him. Athos blinked at the sight then tried to sheathe his sword, realized that he wasn’t wearing a sheath, and bowed slightly. “Come in, Porthos,” he said, stepping around his friend as he did so, and closing the door. “I presume that’s a dish of pigeons?”

Porthos looked down at the vessel in his hands and seemed for a moment quite confused. Then he said, “Oh. No. That is, it used to be. Now it’s just the empty dish.” As he spoke, he set it on the last step of the stairs, and looked up at Athos, who had gone up half a dozen steps, candle in one hand, sword in the other. “I used it to break into the Bastille.”

“I see,” Athos said, thinking that, in fact, those words were starting to have an apposite meaning to him.

“And I must tell you what Mousqueton said,” Porthos said. “Because I think it is deucedly important and in fact it might solve the whole mystery for us… only… only I’m not sure how. You know I’m not good at seeing the picture until it is all completed.”

“Yes,” Athos said. “Yes, of course.” And, making a sudden decision added, “Here, take my sword and candle up, Porthos. Put the sword with my clothes, then go in and wake D’Artagnan and Aramis on my bed. I can see all efforts at sleeping tonight will be blighted, and that I might as well give up and stay awake. Tell them it is time for a war council. And if Aramis speaks of chickens, for the love of heaven, pour a jug of water over his head. I believe there is still half a jug left from D’Artagnan’s washing.”

“But…” Porthos said. “Where are you going?”

“Myself? Only to the cellar to get a bottle of wine. Sobriety has proven much stranger than I can endure, and I believe a bottle might improve my feelings.”