The Musketeer's Seamstress - By Sarah D'Almeida Page 0,49

as if to remove the hat he wasn’t wearing. Finding nothing, his hand dropped disconsolately. “It’s the Cardinal, Monsieur.”

“Oh, not that,” Porthos said. “I said Monsieur de Treville or even the King. No one is going to believe the Cardinal wants to see me.”

“But . . . Monsieur,” Mousqueton said. “He does.”

Where Families Are Proven to Share More than Coats of Arms; A Musketeer’s Capitulation

THE sun was setting and Aramis sat by the window of his room. He was all too aware that he should be at Vespers—having heard the bells of the private chapel on the grounds ring, then ring again as if his mother had ordered the bell ringer to remind Aramis of his duties.

But he sat by the window instead and reread, one by one the letters from the thick sheaf of letters that Violette had sent him. He’d kept them all, from the slightly formal ones at the beginning of their acquaintance, to the later ones, full of poems and stories of her daily life. He’d tied them together with a ribbon, and he kept them at his hand. Now, as he opened them, the faint fragrance of the paper reminded him of her.

The thing about Violette was that she was such a lousy writer. The beautifully shaped handwriting of the convent girl that Violette had once been was formed into words that were sometimes Spanish and sometimes French and sometimes some odd amalgam of the two which Aramis could only decipher thanks to his knowledge of Latin.

So many times he’d scolded her for her incapacity to write in one language only. But now he read her silly confusion through tears in his eyes and wished he could have her back—that he could spend one more night with her, receive one more letter from her. And he wouldn’t complain, not even if it was all in Spanish.

He put his hands on the stone parapet of his window, and rested his chin on them, looking out onto the fields gilded by the setting sun. They were empty now, the farmers having gone to their homes for dinner.

If he squinted in the direction of the nearby hamlet of Trois Mages, from which most of his domain’s peasants came, he could see faint traces of grey smoke climbing up against the blue sky. Suppers being cooked, he wagered.

And he wished—with all his heart and soul—that he and Violette could have been two of those peasants and able to marry and live together. He would leave every morning to work in the fields—his attempts at picturing this failed because though he’d lived in the country for most of his life, he’d never spent much time observing what farmers did all day. No matter. He was sure it was tiring and full of effort, but what did it matter? He’d come home every night to their hovel, to find his Violette and their children.

He pictured the children they would have had—blond as they were, with Violette’s expressive blue eyes. The girls would all be beauties and the boys all tall and strong, like their father.

He sighed, a sigh to burst his chest. Then he got up and turned around, clasping Violette’s letters, in their silk ribbon, to his chest. Sighing, he consigned them to a hiding place between a pile of books on his table.

He felt restless and small.

For years now, he’d been a musketeer, his own man, living in Paris as he pleased. And he’d had Violette.

But now Violette was gone and Aramis felt like he was a young man once more—helpless, bound to his formidable mother’s will.

It was as though his mother had preserved Aramis’s childhood, his youthful place in his home, just as she had preserved his father’s study.

And now his father’s study came to Aramis’s mind as an excellent place to hide in from his mother’s enforced devotions. His mother might keep it as a shrine, but he’d never seen her enter it.

It was locked, but as a musketeer in Paris—or even as a seminarian in his early years there—before Violette, Aramis had learned the fine art of picking locks and developed it into such a science that he could open almost any lock with a simple knife.

He found such a knife amid his youthful treasures, beneath a loose floorboard.

From there to running down the stairs to the entrance hall and his father’s locked room, was a moment.

Picking the lock took no time at all.

The study remained as he remembered from childhood—all was covered in dust save