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