Hermengarde said. “And I had his answer by present.” She smiled. “Monsieur Porthos taught him to write, but I must say his handwriting is abominable. And his spelling.” She smiled more broadly. “You see, I learned to write, myself. Some ladies opened a school and taught the children. But I can say Mousqueton . . .”
“Spells and traces his letters like Porthos,” Aramis said, amused.
“No, really? But it is often that way, when you have these big men, with their way . . . I bet Monsieur Porthos was too restless to sit and learn his letters when he was little.”
Aramis didn’t think there was any need to tell her that the truth was that monsieur’s old and crusty father found it unnecessary for his son to learn to write and, in fact, believed that such gifts could emasculate his tall, redheaded son. “And what did the note say?”
“He said he would request my hand of me tonight and of my father tomorrow. You see?” She looked up at Aramis, tears trembling in her eyes. “There was no reason at all for him to kill poor Monsieur Langelier père. I can’t think why he should do such a thing.”
“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.
Hammers and Swords; The Tendency of Objects Not To Fall; Where Porthos Decides It Would be a Bad Idea To Drop Objects on His Own Head
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