eat too. I don’t suppose you would stay till dinner and then . . . perhaps . . .” She did her best at a coquettish expression. “I have my own room, you know, behind the kitchens.”
Porthos blinked. He had never thought the woman would think of him in that way. Not that he, in the way of such things, disdained working women. On the contrary. He’d been aware for some time that he preferred hardworking women with callused hands. But this woman, though in a certain light she could be considered appetizing if not pretty—in a very dim light—simply could not have Porthos.
Porthos shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Truth be told, he was as attached to a woman as Aramis had been to his duchess. Perhaps more so. Madame Athenais Coquenard, an accountant’s wife, might not be pretty. She was certainly no longer young. And nothing in her wardrobe compared to the clothes a duchess commanded. As for the largess she could bestow upon the musketeer that held her heart . . . well, that, too, was little and measured out, as her husband kept control of the household finances.
However, since he’d first climbed to her window, Porthos found that all other women had lost their allure. Oh, he could admire them, and he knew the turn of a full bosom or an elegant ankle would always catch his eye.
But when it came to it, and strange as it might seem, he would feel as guilty for sleeping with another woman as if he were committing adultery—oh, not the pleasing kind he committed with Athenais. Rather, as if he were betraying her. And his own heart. And that he could not do.
And yet, he needed to get this woman to tell him what she found.
Porthos managed to plaster a look of regret on his face—it was half felt. He could have used the dinner—and he bowed to the woman. “Madame. I would love to accept your very generous invitation, but I have business tonight.” And seeing her face fall, he hastened. “Important business. For . . . Monsieur de Treville himself.” He got up from the bench, and bent over the woman’s hand, lightly kissing the fingers which were pleasantly perfumed of roast. “I shall return tomorrow, though, if I should be so favored.”
“Oh, do,” the woman said. “Do return tomorrow. Perhaps I’ll have some gossip about secret passages for you.”
Porthos hoped so. He also hoped that he would find some way to evade spending the night. In fact, he thought he’d best prearrange it.
He bowed again, and left the kitchen, thinking.
The Prodigal’s Awakening; Brushes and Mirrors; Monacal Disciplines
ARAMIS turned in bed and woke up with the sun in his eyes. For a moment he was confused. His room in Paris didn’t have a window directly facing the bed through which daylight could arrive and intrude upon his sleeping hours.
He blinked disconsolately in the light, while his mind caught up with the location of his body. His nose filled with a smell he hadn’t smelled in a long time, a clean smell of . . . grass? Flowers? His eyes, wide open, gave him an impression of overwhelming light and whiteness. And his ears filled with the noise of birds and, distantly, the just-tuneless song of women in the repetitive, monotonous tone of a folk work song.
All of this worked in his memory to one thing. His childhood home.
He reached beneath himself to feel his narrow bed with its scrupulously clean sheets and looked around his small, clean room. No, not clean, bare. White walls. A wooden cross on the wall, watching over his bed, his every move, his very thoughts. A peg on the far wall was supposed to hold all his suits—all it held at the moment was the two black suits—velvet, but still black—that he’d been allowed all the time he was growing up. They consisted of knee breeches and tightly laced doublets in the fashion of twenty years ago, the fashion that Athos favored. Where his trunk with the clothes he’d bought in Paris had gone, was anybody’s guess. No, not guess. His mom would have seen to it that it was . . . disposed of.
Aramis’s head ached, and the previous day ran through it like a series of scenes, a series of shadows on the blankness that had invaded his brain. As if they’d happened to someone else, he saw his escape from Paris, his gallop across the late-spring countryside, his arrival here,