fresh-faced country wench deposited two mugs of red wine in front of them.
It occurred to Porthos that this cook, like Athos, had worked out a system of signals by which means she commanded her subordinates. But then, he thought, listening to the din of knives and spits, of roaring fire and screaming women, how else was she to command them, but with gestures?
He sipped the wine, as the cook spoke again. “I don’t suppose you have a friend looking for a servant? One who would use the same consideration to my brother that you use for your Mousqueton? My brother he’s not bad you see . . . he’s only . . . well, he doesn’t understand why he shouldn’t have the finer things of life that others have, and it upsets him. He’s a good boy, but weak.”
Porthos nodded and sighed. “So is Mousqueton,” he said. Though his conscience reproached him for telling a falsehood. Truth be told, with his servant it was always more a matter of seeing what he could possibly get away with, what he could abscond with right from beneath observer’s noses. Meanwhile Porthos, taking a sip of the wine and finding it of better quality than he expected, was trying to frame a way to ask the woman about secret passages in the palace.
His instinct was to come right out and blurt it, of course, ask her about the famed secret passages of the palace. But even Porthos was not so direct or so trusting in the simplicity of life as to plunge headlong into that subject.
Instead, he chose to take a detour and approach it by degrees. “Unfortunately,” he said. “My friend who is best connected and who knows his way around every great house in Paris . . .” He stopped and sighed and drank his wine. He could feel the cook’s beady eyes fixed on him. “Well, his name is Aramis and—”
The cook gasped and took her large capable hand to her mouth. “Not that Aramis. Not the blond musketeer who was the lover of Madame Ysabella de Yabarra y Navarro de Dreux?”
Porthos sighed and did his utmost to look grieved at having to mention this sad fact. Truth was, he knew people well enough. A friend who might be a murderer was even better than a thieving servant to buy him time and the attention of the cook.
“Aramis loved her well, it’s true,” he said. “He told us she was a seamstress, the niece of his theology professor . . . He called her Violette.”
The cook smiled at the idea of the duchess being the niece of a theology professor. “He seemed so nice,” she said. “The musketeer, not the theology professor. Always talking about doctrinal stuff and theology. He said he meant to be a priest one day.” She sighed. “But I guess that is all over now.”
Here Porthos stirred. “Why?”
“Well, having killed the Duchess de Dreux.” The cook shrugged her capable shoulders, muscular from years of lifting pans and turning spits loaded with game. Her gesture, with no words, seemed to imply that Aramis’s life was as good as over.
Porthos frowned. Part of the frown was automatic. He’d known Aramis since Aramis was little more than an apprentice priestling, his words all rounded, his manner all meek and mild. He still could not imagine Aramis killing a woman, particularly not that woman on whom so much of Aramis’s heart and soul hung.
The other part of the frown was calculated, a deliberate move to draw in the attention of the woman.
It worked. The cook, her eyes on him, frowned, slowly. “You know something, don’t you? You don’t think he killed her.”
“Oh, it is not that,” Porthos said, and, because he was not used to deceiving anyone, he felt an odd excitement, his heart beating in his throat. He felt prouder than he ever did of his wins on the battlefield, and he wished that Aramis, who always said that Porthos couldn’t deceive a child, would see him now. “It’s just that Aramis loved the woman so much.”
“Well, it is often the greatest lovers who kill their beloved, isn’t it?” the cook asked, raising her thick eyebrows while a no less thick finger beat a delicate tattoo on the handle of her mug. “Passion is fickle, is it not? They discover that she has another on the side, or that she is intending on replacing them and . . . well . . . there it is.”
“But . . .”