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