The Musketeer's Seamstress - By Sarah D'Almeida Page 0,15

don’t think I killed her,” he said. “Truly, I don’t. But I cannot imagine how anyone else could. The inaccessible room, the locked door . . .” He shrugged. “I tell you, for a moment I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure at all.”

“If you’d killed her,” Porthos said. “Why would you cry out when you found she was truly dead? Why would you think it was all a prank and a joke?”

And in this, Porthos was correct, would be correct. Aramis was grateful to his friend for bringing the witness of his own actions to his rescue. “Perhaps I wouldn’t,” he said.

But Athos cleared his throat. “You know how sometimes, when you drink too much you wake in the morning and have no memory at all of what you’ve done?” And to Porthos’s nod, he added. “I’ve heard this happens sometimes, too, when you do something the mind finds too terrible to accept. There was . . .” He paused. “There was this woodcutter in my father’s estate, who one day cut up his entire family with an ax. People saw him do it.” Athos shook his head, in wonderment. “And yet, he would swear by the Virgin and all the saints that he’d never done it, that his enemies must have gone in, behind him, and killed all his loved ones. And he wasn’t lying. We are sure of it. He just couldn’t remember it.”

Aramis stared at Athos’s stern features for a moment. Could Aramis have? Could he have killed Violette and forgotten all about it? He heard a low groan escape his throat and put his face down into his hands.

“Oh, nonsense,” Porthos said. And added in a tone of someone making the final argument, “Aramis is not a woodcutter.”

But Aramis wasn’t sure at all that his social class protected him from suspicion. He wasn’t a woodcutter. He was a musketeer. He had become used to killing people. It would be easier for him than for some peasant. He groaned again.

D’Artagnan drew in breath loudly, a sound that, in the otherwise still room, echoed like a shot. “Porthos makes a good argument,” he said. “For a woodcutter, perhaps, killing someone would be something to forget forever. But Aramis . . . has killed people before. With no forgetfulness.”

Aramis looked up at the youth with hope. D’Artagnan, he had suspected for sometime, was the cleverest of them all. Oh, not the most cultured. That honor belonged to Athos. And not the most cunning. Modest though his beliefs and his future chosen profession obliged Aramis to be, they didn’t force him into blatant lying. He was the most cunning and this he must admit. But D’Artagnan was the cleverest, capable of penetrating to the heart of a question or the main point of an event.

The heart of the matter here was that Aramis had no reason to forget, had he killed Violette. He blinked at the young guard.

D’Artagnan nodded, as though having read the desired response in Aramis’s eyes. “Did you have any reason to wish her dead?” he asked. “Had she played you false or somehow betrayed you?”

Aramis took a deep breath and shook his head. “And even if she had,” he said, then shrugged, unable to explain fully. “We were never . . . I was never for her nor she for me. She has a husband somewhere and I am bound for the church, eventually. If she had another lover or twenty, as long as she did not turn me away from her door . . .” He shrugged again.

“And that she clearly hadn’t done,” D’Artagnan said, and bit at the corner of his upper lip, a gesture he made when deep in thought.

Aramis shook his head.

“The problem is,” D’Artagnan said, and his hand went to the pommel of his sword as though the very words required a defensive posture. “The problem is that not everyone in Paris knows you as we do, or can think through your actions as I can.”

Aramis drew in breath. He understood the words D’Artagnan had not said. “I am suspected?” he asked.

D’Artagnan waved his hand in a way that reminded everyone forcefully that he came from Gascony, near the border with Spain. “It is only tavern rumor,” he said unhappily. “But tavern rumor has it that you killed your . . . seamstress because she loved another better.”

“It is hardly to be wondered at,” Athos said. “When you left your uniform behind, and it is well known that you visited the