The Musketeer's Seamstress - By Sarah D'Almeida Page 0,42
He was sure his mother would be shocked—perhaps halfway to her death—if he did run through the house in his small clothes. He was also sure he could never dress until he tamed his hair. His hair was blond and fine, abundant, and possessed of just enough curl to become a hopelessly knotted mass if not kept brushed. And his mother had never denied him his hairbrushes, not even when he was a child. He had no intention to put up with what he was sure was Bazin’s tyranny.
He had set his feet on the scrubbed oak floor, and stood, when the door opened.
Reluctantly Bazin proffered two silver-handled brushes. “You may have these,” he said. “But your mother said no mirror.”
Aramis thought of what he would like to reply to that edict, as he plied his brushes with the well-accustomed ease of a man who had lived without a proper valet for far too long. Bazin had never been a valet in the sense of caring for Aramis’s appearance, and Aramis had long ago given up on trying to get Bazin to help him dress or comb since Bazin disapproved of vanity.
He combed himself by touch, rescued his black silk ribbon from the bedclothes and tied his hair back with it.
When he looked up from this task, Bazin had filled the small ceramic basin on its bare metal stand with water from a pitcher.
The water was cold, but Aramis expected no more. He washed hands and face, quickly and found Bazin extending a rough linen towel, which Aramis used.
Then he slipped into his white linen shirt, and then into the very plain black breeches and doublet that Bazin had got from the peg on the wall. They were uncomfortable, confining and prickly, compared to his normal outfits.
Once fully attired, he put on his boots. But even with the boots—the same he’d worn with his musketeers uniform and which bore too military a cut to fit with this outfit—he was aware that he looked like the seminarian he’d once been.
He felt curiously naked and vulnerable as he walked downstairs to be greeted by his mother, who waited him at the bottom of the stairs. Madame D’Herblay was dressed in all black silk, a columnar dress that made her seem at once frailer and more unassailable. She was putting on her black lace gloves, and looked at him reproachfully. “Rene,” she said. “You are late for Matins.”
“Madame,” Aramis said, rebelling at his mother, at the use of his true given name, and at the idea of starting the day with a religious celebration.
Truth was, while in Paris, in his musketeer’s uniform, even with Violette’s sweet caresses, even with all the pleasures of Paris, Aramis often felt like a displaced seminarian.
But now, here, in the wilderness of his native domain, in his mother’s house with its monacal discipline, wearing the same black suit he had worn as a seminarian, the Chevalier Rene D’Herblay had never felt quite so much like Aramis, the musketeer.
Where Old Friends Meet; The Count and the Duke; A Country Gentleman’s Estate
“COUNT!”
This was the greeting addressed to Athos as he and D’Artagnan were admitted into the gated manor house of what looked like an enormous domain.
They’d ridden through the day yesterday, and then rested at an inn before riding again. Most of the morning they’d been crossing a verdant, well cared for land that had the look and feel of belonging all to the same domain and the same Lord. Serfs and farmers, in the fields, wore similar outfits. And were, D’Artagnan noted, well dressed and better fed than most peasants in France.
“This is all Raoul’s land—the Duke de Dreux’s,” Athos had said, at a time when they were walking the horses apace. “Oh, he has other lands, in his vassalage. But these are under his care, proper.”
And D’Artagnan’s, whose hereditary domain was smaller than the cemetery Des Innocents in Paris, had looked around, openmouthed, at villages and hunting lodges, at palaces and chapels and churches. So this was the domain of Athos’s friend? And the domain that Aramis’s lover had disdained? If D’Artagnan had the like, this kind of property to retire to, he doubted he would have any interest at all in Paris. And had Athos left a similar property behind?
D’Artagnan didn’t know, didn’t want to think about it. But even he couldn’t miss the respect in the voice of the servant that opened to them the ornate gates set in ten-foot-tall stone walls.