Sarah D'Almeida - Dying by the Sword

“Well,” Aramis said, but without much force. “We… we don’t think he did it. Monsieur Porthos is sure he’s innocent.”

“Like he was sure of your innocence,” Hermengarde said. “When everyone said that you’d done murder. I’m sure with such friends on his side, Mousqueton will be fine.”

Aramis nodded and took his leave of her, and managed to get himself lost in a maze of hallways before he saw his own tear-streaked face in a mirror he was passing. For a moment he was disoriented, as though this were a stranger, whom he had to find a way to console. And then he realized that the woebegone face looking blankly at him was his own, and in his own eyes he read what he was thinking of.

Hermengarde was with child-or probably was-and Mousqueton might very well be lost to her. And Aramis’s own Violette had been carrying his child when she’d died. He tried to think whether his son or daughter would now have been born, but he kept getting muddled in the months, his mind confused.

What he wanted, what he craved was to wind back time, to make Violette’s death not have happened, and to return her warm and living to his arms, with the baby that was theirs, and whom he would have contrived to raise to carry on his name. The tears in the reflected eyes multiplied, and he groaned, under his breath.

Pulling another handkerchief from his sleeve, he looked at it blankly, surprised, because he didn’t normally carry more than one handkerchief. The initials were RH-Rene D’Herblay, the name he’d given up when he’d taken up the uniform, but which still survived in the embroidered handkerchiefs his mother sent him-and so this was his handkerchief. That meant, he must have given another handkerchief to Hermengarde, and that could only mean that he’d give the little maid the handkerchief of the Duchess de Chevreuse.

He smiled at his own reflection in the mirror, as he erased all traces of his tears. Walking to a window, he unlatched and threw it open, to allow the cold night air to efface the last vestiges of his grief from his pale, easily marked skin.

Then he closed the window and walked down the hallway to a door, where he stopped and scratched at the wood.

“Open,” a sultry voice called from within. He opened.

The Duchess de Chevreuse stood at a writing desk, dusting with sand a sheet of paper that she had, presumably just written. She looked at him with a smile. “Chevalier,” she said, “but how enchanting of you to come. I was just about to send you a note.”

He went in and closed the door.

PORTHOS didn’t know when his mind had become attached to the high unlikelihood of Mousqueton’s having dropped a hammer on his own head. He just knew that it had. Of course, it would have been far easier to ask the question of Mousqueton, but he judged from Monsieur de Treville’s expression that such an interview would be a hard thing to arrange.

And so, Porthos was left with the explanation that the guards of the Cardinal had given for having found Mousqueton unconscious next to the murdered armorer. And all he could do was to interest himself in the matter personally, as it were.

At any rate, Porthos had found, through the many crimes he and his friends had got involved in-and truly, what was it that had brought so many sudden deaths into their path all of a sudden?-that more than people’s conversations, more than confessions or lack thereof, more than the deceptions and counter deceptions of humans, what made sense to him were concrete facts: where blood had fallen when it erupted frm the body of the murdered person. And how far the man had to walk after being hurt, or else, whether there was another way into a room.

Words were all very well, Porthos thought. Certainly, Aramis seemed to derive an immense amount of pleasure from fiddling around with them, arranging them pleasantly and, sometimes, twisting them around to give them meanings that nature never intended. Words were to Aramis as wigs were to certain men, who liked to sport a different head of curly hair for every day of the week-utterly unnecessary but a source of great pride and joy.

Porthos didn’t begrudge Aramis this joy. At least he didn’t begrudge it when Aramis was using the words for purposes other than bludgeoning Porthos with them. When he was using them for that purpose, Porthos tended to become rather ill-tempered, because most of those words made no more sense to him than if Aramis were to speak a foreign language. Which, in fact, he found, Aramis often did, speaking Latin or Greek, or who knew what else, and making the chore of understanding him yet more difficult.

And Athos… Athos hoarded words like a miser hoards gold. And when he spoke at all, it was as likely to be in his own words as in the words of some great writer dead a thousand years or more.

The one whose words made the most sense to Porthos was D’Artagnan. Not that the young man was always straightforward. But he tended to use his words to serve a purpose, and not just to make himself feel this way or that. And words, as far as Porthos was concerned, were just-tools-tools with which he was, he confessed, devilishly clumsy.

So he would leave words behind. He was sure, just like Aramis intended to question Hermengarde, that Athos would go and question someone or other at the palace. And D’Artagnan would, doubtlessly, find some Gascon to give him information about something. As many Gascons as there were in the capital, and as clannish as they tended to be, the surprising thing would be if he didn’t find someone to give him information.

But all of this involved words and understanding the words of others, and Porthos simply did not have the patience to deal with that. So, instead, he would deal with hammers and swords-things that could not lie and that very rarely spoke in words. Well, at least not unless one was dead drunk. And even then, Porthos was fairly sure that the swords and the hammers didn’t talk so much as the wine roared in his head.

He walked away from Athos and D’Artagnan as they were trying to convince Aramis not to leave. Why they were trying to do that was quite beyond Porthos’s ken, since, after all, Aramis had always done exactly what he wanted to do and would doubtless continue to do so. He walked along gradually narrowing streets, till he found himself on the street where the armory stood. It was still closed. Or perhaps, he thought, it was closed again.

After all, he thought, the armory wouldn’t be open now, because-and he cast a surprised look up at the sky-night had fallen. A look around sufficed to tell him the streets were quite deserted. Unlike parts of town where there were taverns, or hostelries, there was nothing here to call the custom passersby. Only homes, and closed stores.

From the homes, usually right next to the stores, came voices and the occasional cry of infants. None of the homes were very large or very sturdy-just barely more than hovels, made of stone. The house next to the armorer’s was a little larger, and perhaps in this area it passed as a wealthy residence. Porthos supposed so, after looking at it appraisingly. He also judged, from the light of fire and probably candles emanating through the cracks in the wooden shutters of the room most distant from the armorer’s, that everyone would be gathered there, probably having dinner. This meant, if he was going to break into the armory, now would be the best time to do it.

He walked towards the door, as though he had every right to be there. Although he doubted that very many people would be looking out of doors at this time, he had long ago learned that when doing something reprehensible or-in this case-highly illegal, it was best to proceed as though one were doing something official and perfectly legitimate.