The Musketeer's Seamstress - By Sarah D'Almeida Page 0,48
when he was agitated or puzzled. “Perhaps there is a secret door that opens into the wardrobe itself.”
The maid frowned. “I don’t think so,” she said.
“Please, Mademoiselle,” he said. “Aramis is a dear friend and I cannot renounce all hope for his innocence without verifying.”
The girl went very serious, and nodded. “That I understand,” she said. “It’s no use, but follow me then. I wish the blond musketeer no harm myself. I’ve often told the other maids he’s the best looking man who’s ever come into this palace. My Mousqueton excepted, of course.”
Thus speaking, she led him down several corridors, softly lit by candles on holders upon the wall, till they came to a small hallway, whose wall was filled wholly by a large mirror set in an ornate golden frame.
Hermengarde pushed this and pulled that within the frame, pressing a rosette and twirling an ornamental nail till the whole glass creaked and moved inward, opening.
It revealed a narrow little space, dark and smelling of sawdust and disuse.
“You go first,” she told him. “Otherwise you’ll not get near enough the wall to push any part of it and make sure there is or isn’t a door. You won’t, for that matter, be able to look through the eye openings. Why, often my friends and I, when we come here, have to cram past each other to get a look, and we’re much smaller than you.”
Porthos wondered if they often came to watch Aramis and his lady at their sport, but it wasn’t the sort of thing he could ask with impunity of a near stranger, even of a near stranger who appeared to be very well known of Mousqueton.
Instead, he walked briskly down the twisting tunnel, which ended in what looked like a little window ornamented by little shutters. The maid had got a candle along the way and was now holding it aloft. “You may open the screen,” she said. “There’s no one in that room so there’s no risk they’ll see even a spark of light from my candle. The Cardinal himself has taken a great interest in that room, and after the door they forced down was repaired, he had had it locked and kept under watch with the musketeer’s uniform still in it, so that he can bring witnesses to see the musketeer’s guilt.”
“He’s so sure he’s guilty,” Porthos said, and sighed. The maid didn’t answer.
Porthos opened the little shutter and looked through. The room was dark, the only light coming through the door to the balcony, the same door that Aramis had used to escape.
By that meager light, Porthos could see that the room was full of furniture, and that the massive oak bed appeared to have been stripped of all its coverings. But Aramis’s uniform was still where the musketeer had left it, flung across one of the arm chairs.
Porthos backed away a little and turned his attention to the wall around the little shuttered window.
It was smooth plaster, and he couldn’t see any part that might be hinged or even any part that was different from the rest. But then again, in this palace, smooth walls often weren’t and mirrors and portraits could swing unexpectedly to reveal passages and byways.
He felt the wall all over, methodically, from top to bottom, his massive but sensitive hands feeling for any irregularity, any soft spot, anything that might trigger a hidden spring.
“See, I told you there was no way.”
“No,” Porthos said. And since the little shuttered space covered by the portrait was no more than a handsbreadth wide and a hand span tall, Porthos couldn’t imagine any human so small as to be able to crawl through it.
He sighed, as Hermengarde led him out of the narrow corridor and back in the hall. As she opened the mirror and looked out, she said, “Mousqueton!”
Porthos looked over his shoulder to see his servant standing in the hall. It was at least a quarter of an hour early. Porthos would like to imagine Mousqueton’s eagerness was due to the servant’s wish to see Hermengarde. But he knew it couldn’t be true. Because if he’d rushed to see his lady love, Mousqueton would have changed from his not-so-impressive day clothes—a much worn old suit of Porthos’s. No, Mousqueton was disheveled, and hatless and looked red in the face as if he’d run the whole way.
Hermengarde must have sensed that something was wrong too, because she stepped aside, allowing Porthos to pass. “Mousqueton,” Porthos said. “What is wrong?”