The Musketeer's Seamstress - By Sarah D'Almeida Page 0,21
and gave D’Artagnan a tight smile, before resuming fighting shoulder to shoulder with him.
Porthos had dispatched his more recent opponent who fell to the steps, his whimper the only mark of life left in him. Porthos jumped over the man’s body to resume his fight with Dlancey.
In the hall below a sound somewhere between a grunt and a scream was followed by Athos’s suddenly civil-again voice, “If you give me your sword, I shall help you fashion a tourniquet.”
As the sound of clashing metal had ceased down there, D’Artagnan assumed the suggestion had been followed.
He, himself, quickly made short work of his opponents by inflicting minor but disabling wounds through thigh and arm. Soon the two who had attacked Fasset and himself were lying against the walls or on the steps, groaning. And now Fasset turned to D’Artagnan and bowed. “Should we resume our fight?” he asked. Something like an ironic smile twisted his lips.
Without looking, D’Artagnan was aware of his friends coming up the stairs, aware of Porthos and Athos standing behind him. But neither of them made a move or said a word.
“Would you insist on entering Aramis’s rooms?” he asked.
Fasset bowed slightly, “I’m afraid I must,” he said. “How could I face the Cardinal without having fulfilled the mission he gave me?”
D’Artagnan looked back at his friends to judge their reaction. Porthos looked impassive, waiting. Athos, who was holding his right arm with his left hand just below a spreading red stain on his doublet, shrugged, as if to say that none of this made any difference to him.
D’Artagnan was not stupid. He could understand hints. The rooms that had been of such importance and must be defended at all costs were now of no importance at all. That meant—and D’Artagnan’s own internal clock told him this—that at least an hour had gone by. And Aramis, if nothing had befallen him, was now well on his way to his hideout. And the guards of the Cardinal could never intercept him unless they knew his exact destination.
D’Artagnan nodded to Fasset. “You shall see the rooms, then,” he said. “But with us present.”
Fasset’s turn to shrug, as if all this meant nothing.
D’Artagnan, followed closely by Porthos and Athos, escorted Fasset into the rooms.
“A large cross,” Fasset said, pausing in front of the crucifix on the wall of the entrance room.
“You must know Aramis means to take orders someday,” Porthos said.
Fasset was kind enough to make no comment at that. He looked at the interior room and opened the wardrobe, as though to register its emptiness. He flicked through the papers on the desk, but all without much interest.
“How long has he been gone?” he asked, putting his gloves on, gloves he must have taken off before reaching the house.
D’Artagnan smiled. “You don’t expect me to tell you that?”
“I don’t expect you to tell me anything at all,” Fasset said, and something very much like a grudgingly admiring smile crossed his lips. “It is fortunate for Monsieur Aramis that he has such loyal friends.” He adjusted his gloves in place and looked up to meet D’Artagnan’s gaze with his own, acute, dark gaze. “I hope your confidence in him is not misplaced. I will now collect my comrades and go back to the Cardinal’s. Good day, sir.”
A Council of War; The Various Kinds of Seamstresses; The Memory of Husbands
THE wound in Athos’s arm was deeper than it looked and more painful. Bagot’s sword had pierced all the way down to his bone, and slid along the bone, so that every movement of his right arm brought a painful shock down to his hand and up to his shoulder.
He thought he was bearing it tolerably well, but he should have remembered his friends knew him better than that. Before he could make an excuse and leave for his own lodgings, to nurse his own wound with the help of Grimaud’s tight-lipped wrapping of ligatures and a fine bottle of wine that could make the devil himself forget his wickedness, Athos saw D’Artagnan looking sharply at him.
They had just left Aramis’s house, trusting the wretched Fasset to deal with the remainder of his expeditionary force, most of whom were either too wounded or too weak to walk.
Athos, in his role as the oldest and almost as an adoptive father to his friends, had got a key to Aramis’s lodgings from the landlord and locked the door behind himself. He’d instructed the landlord to give no one the key, though he didn’t know