The Musketeer's Seamstress - By Sarah D'Almeida Page 0,14

the daily readings recommended for priests, sat close to his hand. Despite this, his hair shone, newly brushed, and it was quite clear he’d shaved and trimmed his beard. Which must mean, Athos thought with some relief, that Aramis was close to his normal state.

As if to prove this, Aramis nodded to them as they came in and stood up—since there was no place for them to sit. “I want to thank you,” he said. “All three of you, for lending me succor in my extremity yesterday. I shudder to think what would have happened to me without your help.”

Porthos shrugged and shuffled uneasily. “You’d have done the same for us,” he said.

“But we do wonder,” D’Artagnan said. “What brought you to such need and what the circumstances were . . . why you fled the way you did, leaving even your uniform behind.”

Even in his state of grave seriousness that implied, perhaps, true mourning, Aramis’s lips quivered and his green eyes sparkled at D’Artagnan’s tactful probing. “I did not have time to dress,” he said. “Because the servants were knocking the door down. I’m afraid I screamed when I found . . .” He swallowed. “When I realized that Violette was truly dead and it was not a prank she was playing on me.”

“You were surprised at finding her dead, then?” Athos asked.

“Of course he was, Athos, what a question,” Porthos said. “Who would expect his lover to be killed?”

Athos didn’t answer Porthos, but looked steadily at Aramis, whose gaze, meeting his, showed an understanding of Athos’s question. Aramis, himself, clearly didn’t think he was incapable of murder, no matter what Porthos thought.

“I was,” he said. “Shocked. I’d only stepped to this little closet beside her room, in which she keeps—kept a chaise percée for . . . such needs as arose. Only a few minutes. And I came out to find Violette dead. I was quite shocked. Though . . .” Aramis’s green eyes flickered with something, like a shadow passing over a sunlit landscape.

“Though?” Athos prompted.

Aramis sighed. “Though in the next few seconds, as I contemplated the locked door, the impossibility of a passage into the room, the inaccessibility of the balcony, I wondered if I . . .” Again he floundered, and he gestured, with his hands, as if expressing the inability of language to translate his meaning. Then he rubbed the tips of his fingers on his forehead, as if massaging fugitive memory. “I wondered if I could have committed the monstrous deed and forgotten all about it.”

The Wisdom of the Tavern; A Musketeer’s Regrets; An Unpleasant Decision

ARAMIS saw the look of disbelief in Porthos’s eyes, before his friend said, “You did not kill her.”

He wished he could be as certain as Porthos was. The truth of it was that his and Porthos’s friendship had been founded on the fact that the two men were as different as two men could be. Aramis’s mind ran on words and maxims, on remembered readings, on the wisdom of the ages, while he very often thought that if someone cut off Porthos’s massive and skillful hands the man would become unable to think at all.

In Porthos’s world the idea that one might not know whether he’d killed someone or not was preposterous, insane. If Porthos had taken the trouble to murder anyone, Porthos would very well remember it.

But Aramis knew his own mind and the perfidious way in which his thoughts could hide behind his words and his feelings behind his thoughts so that he could never be sure of himself until he’d acted. And sometimes not even then.

Take Violette, for instance. It had all started as a harmless flirtation on a summer night, when she’d been too bored to remain alone in her room and had sought him out, at his guard post, to talk.

And he had told himself it was just a silly romantic game, even as it progressed, from the guard post to her bedroom, from the bedroom to a thousand talks and discussions in her receiving room, until she knew all his thoughts and he knew all of hers. Until they were closer than most married people and, in fact, were married in all but law. That final union, her married state and his vocation forbade, as did the width of different classes that separated them.

But he had loved her. And what lunacy will love not induce? “I don’t think,” he started, and his voice cracked and wavered shamefully. He cleared his throat. “I