The Musketeer's Seamstress - By Sarah D'Almeida Page 0,45

hear here that relates . . . That has to do with my true identity.”

“Athos,” D’Artagnan said. “You know you can trust me.”

Athos nodded. “I have in the past, and you have not failed,” he said, and looked around once more, then lowered his voice. “I don’t think Raoul knows his wife is dead.”

“How can he not?” D’Artagnan asked. “Surely there’s been time enough for a messenger—”

“I don’t think anyone has thought to send a messenger. They lived such separate lives.” Athos shrugged. “You noticed he said ‘my wife’ not my late wife?”

“But if he doesn’t know she’s dead, he can’t have killed her,” D’Artagnan said. He felt greatly relieved at this, not only because he sensed how much the possibility of his friend’s guilt worried Athos, but also because he thought that since de Dreux wasn’t guilt they would now be able to leave and go back to Paris and resume the true investigation there.

Athos shook his head. “Or he knows only too well and chooses to hide it. Don’t be mistaken, Raoul can play the fool or the simpleton, if he so wishes, but he is neither. We must stay here till we find where he was two days ago or if he could have hired anyone to do away with his wife, in Paris.”

D’Artagnan sighed and nodded. He hadn’t been cut out for opulence, he thought. This ducal residence made him long for his small rented rooms.

And if the Duke was the murderer, in this vast domain who would prevent him from doing away with an inconvenient guard of a minor nobleman?

Cooks and Maids; Holes and Tunnels; Food and Love

PORTHOS returned to the palace promptly before dinnertime, counting on the cook’s getting busy with dinner and making it easier for him to escape without paying her what she would no doubt consider her due. In the same way, he made sure that Mousqueton would come and call him with an important message from—he didn’t know whom, nor did he particularly care. The King or Monsieur de Treville, either of them would do, so long as it called Porthos away from the cook.

However, for all his wish to avoid the woman’s amorous intentions, Porthos had dressed himself carefully in his gold-embroidered doublet and his best dark blue velvet cloak, he had Mousqueton polish his boots till they shone, and he had combed not only his hair but his luxurious beard and moustache.

It pleased him that passersby—particularly women— stopped to look at his magnificence as he passed. In fact, the entire palace kitchen fell silent as he opened the back door and walked in.

Almost at once the head cook with whom he’d spoken the day before was standing before him, smiling. “Ah, Monsieur,” she said. “I was afraid you didn’t mean to come at all.”

“Of course I meant to come,” Porthos said. He ran down the steps, all seeming eagerness, and bowed deeply while kissing her hand. This brought a giggle—from a woman who was certainly as old as Porthos and who probably weighed almost as much.

“Oh, Monsieur,” she said, blushing. Then she grabbed him by the arm. Her hands were hot. She smelled of cinnamon and ginger. “Come, come, I have news,” she said. And, thus speaking, pulled him—he hadn’t counted on that—to a small room at the back. Her room, judging by its narrow, sagging mattress, propped atop a pallet in a corner.

The devil! Porthos thought. Even if I meant to do the deed, her bed would prove as narrow and uncomfortable as Athenais’s. Athenais bed, not the one she—rarely—shared with her aged husband, but her own, was a single bed that creaked alarmingly under Porthos’s capacious weight.

The cook pushed Porthos in and crowded close. Truth be told, in that room, there wasn’t that much space to contain both of them. And in the same way, the cook looked almost beautiful, her black eyes shining, her lips full and poised at the edge of a smile. But by the light of the single candle on a wall niche near the bed, almost all women who had only one head and all their limbs would look good.

Uncomfortably, more than a little scared by her proximity, more than a little determined not to betray his lovely Athenais, Porthos allowed himself to be pushed into a corner. “You said you had news?” Porthos asked. And hoped Aramis would appreciate Porthos’s efforts and the peril Porthos was enduring for his sake.

“Oh, Monsieur, I’ve talked to all the maids,” as she spoke,