The Musketeer's Seamstress - By Sarah D'Almeida Page 0,29

think his friend could easily fight another duel like today’s. “We shall meet here tonight, then,” he said.

The Prodigal Musketeer; French Manners and Spanish Mourning; Regrets of Exile

THE sun was setting when Aramis reached his ancestral domains. The D’Herblay lands were neither very extensive nor very prosperous, but rather in both struck that happy medium that Greek philosophers held to be the mark of all virtue.

Aramis approached it from the North, coming in past vast fields and farms that other families tenanted for the D’Herblays. The age of the houses, all stone and some covered in ivy, attested to the age of the domain which, Aramis’s mother said, had been in the family since the time of Charlemagne. The first D’Herblay had been a companion of that great king.

Aramis wondered if it was all now to end with the scion of the house being executed as a murderer, and he had to avert his eyes and keep them upon the road. He didn’t see, nor want to see whether the workers on the fields recognized or noticed his passing.

He rode looking on the beaten-dirt road until he found himself riding through his mother’s extensive orchards, wreathed in bloom and leaf for the beginning of spring. After the effluvium of Paris, the smell of ripening fruit and flowers hit Aramis like a return to childhood. As a boy, he’d run through these orchards and hid in the branches from Bazin’s searching eyes. Even back then Bazin, a good ten years older than Aramis, had fixed on Aramis as his pass into a monastery. And that, perforce, meant he must enforce upon the child a virtue that Aramis was little inclined to take upon himself.

Then upon these thoughts came the memory of the last tree Aramis had climbed, or rather descended, and he rubbed at his arms, where the scratches were still visible, and sighed. Perhaps it would have been better for him if he’d listened to Bazin in those early, apple-stealing days.

He walked his horse, apace, between the trees. Here and there he caught glimpses of men and women among the trees. They all stopped and watched him pass. Was this, then how the prodigal came home? Wasn’t he supposed to be in tatters? And yet wasn’t his heart, even now, metaphorically in tatters?

Bazin caught up with him. Though—speed being needed—Aramis had made sure that Bazin had his own horse, as fast as Aramis’s own, Bazin always fell behind. Truth was, with his rotund build, the man was made to ride a mule and made the nervous Arabian buckle. Or perhaps the servant felt that it was not proper to ride side by side with his master.

In either case, he now dragged alongside Aramis and said, “I never expected to see this again.”

And Aramis, his eyes filled with beauty, his mind streaming with thoughts of his happy childhood said, “You didn’t?” in some surprise.

Bazin shook his head. His thin lips were set in disapproval, his eyes half closed in disdain. “I thought we’d be in a monastery by now, happy in the service of the Lord,” Bazin said.

“And you never thought to visit the domains again?” Aramis asked.

Bazin shook his head, while his closed-tight mouth mirrored his disapproval of what he would no doubt call the allure of the world.

Aramis shook his head in turn, not understanding Bazin. Bazin was the son of prosperous tenants on the D’Herblay lands, and his father had sometimes served as the elder Monsieur D’Herblay’s valet. Aramis, himself, as a child, had often visited the home of Bazin’s parents, where he’d been feted and petted by Bazin’s mother. He couldn’t imagine what his servant’s complaints about such an upbringing might be that made him not wish to see the domain again.

But now they’d left the orchards behind and rode into what his mother pleased to call the park, but which was really nothing but large gardens, set with some old statues and a few stones disposed such as made them suitable to sit upon. The abundance of prey for hunting and the ornamental fountains of other, more prosperous parks quite eluded the D’Herblays. There was a fountain, in truth, but too old and blunted by time to look in any way ornamental.

And yet, the park, such as it was, held a thousand tumultuous memories for Aramis. There, behind that rock, he had stolen his first kiss—from a giggling, fresh-faced farmer’s girl. And there, where the oak tree spread its branches, sheltering the clearing around it from