The Musketeer's Seamstress - By Sarah D'Almeida Page 0,17
this one, that you—”
Aramis felt a hint of his old accustomed smile come to his lips and twist them upwards ironically. “Oh, trust me, Porthos, no one will think I killed anyone for this lady.”
He stood up, feeling more decision than he had in a long time, opened his wardrobe, and started stuffing suits into a leather bag, paying little attention to how he lay them in there. “Holla Bazin,” he called, as he did it.
Bazin opened the door a crack and looked in, proving once more that he’d been listening—an abominable habit of which Aramis had tried to break him for years. Might as well try to break a cat from hunting mice.
Looking over his shoulder, Aramis saw Bazin looking at him, with every mark of anxiety stamped on his cherubic features. “Pack what you need to, Bazin,” he said. “We are going to leave Paris for some days.”
“Leave Paris?” Bazin asked. “But on what horses?”
“We’ll hire some,” Aramis said, feeling the weight of Monsieur de Treville’s pouch within his sleeve. “Pack what you need. We’re going out via the coal delivery door.”
Bazin only nodded without asking why, because he probably knew very well why already. He scurried away.
Aramis, having finished throwing all his clothes into his leather saddle bag, in a way that would normally have horrified him, now assumed a sheepish look as he opened the compartment within the wardrobe which contained his crest-embossed stationary. He would not leave this behind, with such a blatant clue to his identity.
Throwing the few sheets into the bag, he backtracked to the table by the window where his silver hair brushes sat, with the initials R H on the handle. These, too, he threw into the bag, then turned with a smile he hoped was engaging. “And now, my friends, I’ll leave everything that is of worth to me in your hands—my reputation and honor and my ability to return to Paris and serve in the musketeers.”
“You know you can trust us,” Athos said.
“Indeed,” Porthos said, with rather more enthusiasm. “We’ll find the villain who killed your lady and we’ll bring him to justice.”
“Him or her,” D’Artagnan said.
“I will trust you, then,” Aramis said and, feeling self-conscious as he always did at these occasions, he put his arm forward, palm up. “One for all.”
“And all for one,” the other three responded, their hands, palm down, falling one after the other, atop of Aramis’s.
And with this reaffirmation of brotherhood, Aramis slung his bag over his shoulder and headed for the door. In the little hall outside his lodgings, instead of heading for the stairs, he opened the smaller and inconspicuous door that led to the servants’ stairs. These stairs, taken all the way down, led to the cellar and from hence to the coal delivery door and outside to the backstreet.
He hurried down the steps, hearing Bazin follow him.
Behind him and down the stairs to the other side, fierce pounding echoed. The guards had mustered their courage and were knocking on the door.
He wasn’t afraid of getting caught. Even if they’d left one man at the coal door entrance, one man he could deal with. And if the guards went through the front door first— as they probably would—his friends would delay them long enough.
It was the prospect of going to his mother’s house, now, that worried Aramis. How would he explain his predicament to Madame D’Herblay?
Oh, he wished he’d never met Violette, if he would now suffer this way for her death. He should have stayed in seminary and stayed away from all women.
Where Three Musketeers Can Slow Six Guards; The Fine Points of Gascon Honor
ARAMIS had barely vanished from the room, when D’Artagnan heard pounding at the door downstairs. He walked out, past Bazin’s—now empty—monklike room, and opened the door to the hall, in time to see a confused half-dozen men, all attempting to climb the narrow stairs at the same time, in a flurry of angry faces, waving arms and the blood red tunics and hats that the guards of Cardinal Richelieu wore.
They were a lot more serious about it than the musketeers who, beyond the color, often allowed all manner of variation in what they called their uniforms. Those guards—the private army of the man who was, for all intents, the power behind the throne in France—were by nature and habit the enemies of the King’s musketeers. In dozens of back alleys and up a hundred public staircases made slippery by the daily muck musketeers and guards