The Musketeer's Seamstress - By Sarah D'Almeida Page 0,10

being still prestigious and expensive.

Above a door here, and a window there, lanterns glowed, lighting the street weakly. And though it wasn’t very late at all, the streets were deserted. In this neighborhood, those who were still up and entertaining would be doing it within their houses, not outside.

Farther on, people walked along the street, in increasingly greater numbers as the roads grew narrower, the houses shabbier and covered in oft-crumbling plaster. Though the night had by then deepened to full dark, the only lanterns burned above tavern signs.

“Aramis,” D’Artagnan whispered. “Aramis—was your . . . seamstress killed? Did you kill her? Why—?”

Aramis turned his head slowly, looking at D’Artagnan as though trying to determine who the young man was. Or perhaps the meaning of the words he said. He started and made a sound like a sob caught at the back of his throat. “Violette,” he said, and his voice was high and complaining. “Violette,” he said, again, and looking at Porthos, added, “She’s dead, Porthos.”

“Shhh,” Porthos said. He glanced around. Only one or two people were looking in their direction and not at all curiously. After all they looked like three musketeers, two of them carrying a third, drunken comrade home. And such outbursts were not unusual from drunken musketeers.

However, and even though Porthos knew that Violette was not the woman’s true name—not even close—wouldn’t there be people who might remember later that the musketeers had spoken of this subject? And if they did, that, coupled with their description, would damn them, would it not?

“Shhh,” Porthos repeated, and looked over Aramis’s shoulder at D’Artagnan. “This is not the time to speak of these things.”

D’Artagnan opened his mouth, as if to protest, but Porthos said, “There will be time. Now, someone might notice too much, or remember what they should not.”

D’Artagnan looked dubious, but nodded and looked around with a most gratifying look of suspicion.

Porthos knew his friends weren’t stupid men. In fact, he also knew that suspicion of stupidity tended to attach to him. At least, it attached to him from other people. None of his three friends seemed to take his sometimes odd or too-obvious seeming questions as a mark of a slow mind.

In return, he tried not to think of them as slow and strange. But he found himself oft marveling at how all of them—perhaps Aramis worst of all, but Athos and even D’Artagnan as well—could ignore the reality before their eyes for the fascinating thoughts inside their heads. It was Porthos’s opinion that people with the turn of mind to get their ideas tangled in the words that formed them could act utterly senseless and get themselves in great danger thereby. He gave a sharp look at D’Artagnan. Good thing Porthos was here to keep his friends out of trouble.

They stumbled into the more crowded part of town where Aramis lived.

Porthos knocked at the door of Aramis’s lodgings, causing the solid-looking oak to tremble, while his huge fist raised echoing booms.

Noise responded from within. Bangs and booms and the sound of ceramic dropping, followed by vigorous cursing in a male voice. Aramis rented his upstairs rooms from a family who occupied the bottom floor. Presently Pierre, the son of the family, pulled the door open with the sort of gesture one makes when one wishes to intimidate the people knocking.

He was intimidating enough, being almost as large as Porthos, dark haired, dark visaged and with a villainous cast to his features that a gold hoop earring enhanced rather than diminished. The almost as large as Porthos was the deciding factor, though. Since he’d become an adult and grown to be considerably larger than normal men both in height and musculature, Porthos had seen many times the changes of expression that now played themselves across Pierre’s face—cockiness, bewilderment, and, finally, obsequiousness.

Pierre bobbed something that might have passed for a bow in Porthos’s direction, then looked over at Aramis and a slow smile spread his lips. “Got himself a bit too drunk, did he?” he said, and moved aside.

Porthos and D’Artagnan dragged the still-insensible Aramis into a small hall from which a narrow staircase led upwards, and a door opened to the left. The door led to the family’s quarters. The staircase led to Aramis’s lodging.

Porthos’s bulk, by himself, took up the entire rung on the stairs. The stairs being open on the right side—with a mere railing dividing them from a fall onto the floor below, it was perilous to attempt to climb three abreast.