The Musketeer's Seamstress - By Sarah D'Almeida Page 0,33

just received his first pay, after having worked for a week teaching fencing in the school of a well known master. He was headed, he remembered, towards a tailor shop, whose velvets and silks he’d coveted every day when he passed its door.

And suddenly, in what was a very modest street, he’d felt a hand snake into his doublet, making unerring way to the coin pouch tucked within.

Porthos was, after all, a fencing master. He’d grabbed at the wrist before the miscreant had a chance to withdraw it.

And found himself holding on to the skinny arm of a street rat, a child living by his wits in the rough and tumble poor streets of Paris. Boniface. Who, upon confessing that he hadn’t eaten in some days and that he didn’t have either father or mother, nor even a brother to look after him, had got rechristened Mousqueton and enlisted in Porthos’s service.

That first fistful of coin that was supposed to buy Porthos the first fashionable clothing of his life had gone to feed the yawning chasm of Mousqueton’s hunger. But Porthos had got more money—and clothing—along the way, and Mousqueton himself had grown to be almost as tall and strong as his master.

And yet that helpless shrug was so much like the one Porthos had seen in the erstwhile street waif that it must perforce have the same meaning. “Mousqueton,” Porthos hissed it as a stage whisper. “Have you been stealing?”

Mousqueton didn’t say a word, but his head hung down in guilt.

“How can you? And at the royal palace yet?”

“Oh, as to that, Monsieur, it’s what every servant does who wants to get something extra for his master. I’ve even seen the king’s valet himself filch a bit of meat while the maids’ backs are turned. Otherwise, there is endless application and begging at various self-proclaimed authorities, before one is allowed a morsel of bread.”

“Has anyone seen you?”

Mousqueton shrugged. “Since I still have my head on my shoulders, and my neck hasn’t been broken by a rope, you can assume I was not seen. On the other hand you could say that the maids . . . suspect.”

“I see,” Porthos said. Internally he reasoned that although it was theft, it was no more than the kitchen staff deserved, for making it difficult for servants to get food for their masters. “Very well. Then you must tell me how to go to the kitchens from here and I shall attempt to find my way myself. Since what I’m looking for is not food . . .”

Mousqueton pointed to the left, “As to that, you take that corridor there, and push the door at the end. You’ll come out at the top of the stairs, looking down on the kitchen. It is the best way to go in, at least when I go to filch something, as that door is rarely used and is in a dark area of the kitchen.”

“The devil. How big are these kitchens, then?” Mousqueton only grinned, a sly grin. “You’ll see,” he said.

Porthos followed the servant’s directions, his mind mulling over how big the kitchen could be. The royal palace was huge, this Porthos knew, housing more people than lived in his own native town. And even if some of those noblemen came with retinues, including servants and cooks, very few were assigned the sort of space in which they could afford to cook more than the occasional egg over a spirit lamp.

Still nothing prepared him for what he saw at the end of his journey down a tangle of corridors, each darker than the other, ending in an unpromising hallway with no windows and only one door. The walls of the hallway were brick and had some sort of fungus growing on them, the grey black type that grows in dark, humid places. The area smelled musty and slightly as though gentlemen had relieved themselves there who had given up on finding their way out in time.

Thinking that Mousqueton had played a mean joke on him, Porthos grasped the handle of the door—a solid and well fitted oak affair—turned it, and . . .

His senses were assaulted from every direction. He stood at the top of a short flight of stairs, in the darker area of the kitchen, facing . . . Pandemonium.

Smells of roasts of all sort, a medley of spices greater than any he’d ever experienced in conjunction, assaulted Porthos’s nose, mingled—alas—with the smell of sweat, of unwashed clothing, of vegetables gone seriously to