the week. Wrinkling his brow with the effort of thinking of anything but his sudden and cruel bereavement, he said, “I think D’Artagnan is standing guard at Monsieur des Essarts. And they’re probably with him.”
“I’ve thought of that,” the captain said. “And I’ve sent three runners, one to each of their lodgings and one to my brother-in-law’s palace. One or the other of them should be home, and I’ve asked that he come here right away.”
Aramis didn’t understand this at all. “Why?” he asked.
“Because one or the other of them should have some idea of where to hide you. I confess I don’t. I could put you in one of several monasteries where I have acquaintances, but I think you’re rather well known at all of them. You have, if you forgive me saying so, Aramis, a recognizable face. And everyone knows the story of the musketeer who quotes theology.”
Aramis nodded. He supposed he’d made himself notorious. It was only one of his many sins. Woe to him who gives scandal.
He continued contemplating the sad state of his boots and the sorry state of his soul. He never quite felt as though he owed enough penance to go back to his mother’s house and face the humorless Dominican again.
If he had to, at any rate, he’d profess here in town and with the Jesuits.
Of course, no order would take him. Not now, when half of Paris believed him guilty of murder, and the other half didn’t only because they’d never heard of him or met him.
Monsieur de Treville brought him out of the reverie by closing his door to the antechamber again. The captain stood by the door, his hands open in a gesture of impotence in the face of the trials of life. “None of them are at their lodgings and the man sent to Monsieur des Essarts couldn’t find the Gascon.” Monsieur de Treville shrugged. “I truly don’t know what to do with you, Aramis.”
Aramis didn’t quite know what to do with himself either. But he knew sitting in this chair, listening to the accustomed chatter from the antechamber was sheer torture. After all, the chatter was as distant from him just now, as barred to him, as if it had been the language of the angels or the musings of the gods. Aramis couldn’t simply walk out there and meet his old comrades at arms and fall easily into the pattern of gossip and bragging, of friendship and rivalry that had been his life for these many years.
The corps of musketeers was not so different from a monastery, he thought. Both offered brotherhood. And he imagined that being defrocked hurt as much as having suspicion and doubt bar him from the musketeers.
He turned to Monsieur de Treville, “Let me go,” he said. “I will find my own way.”
As he spoke, he was gathering his own hair—the fine, soft mass of it, twisting and knotting it, till he could pile it at the top of his head and pull his black hat down over the whole.
“How are you going to leave?” Monsieur de Treville asked. “My plan was to get one of your friends here, or preferably all of them, and have you follow them, through the antechamber, play the part of one of their servants.”
Which meant only that either it had been a very long time since Monsieur de Treville had engaged in any sort of covert intrigue, or that even their captain had no idea of how well the musketeers, as a body, knew each other.
They’d fought together, roomed together at the battle fronts, challenged each other on the stairs up to the antechamber, got drunk together and wenched together. There were very few men in the corps, and those new acquisitions only, that Aramis wouldn’t know even with the degree of disguise he was wearing.
As for himself, as long as he’d been in the corps, as notorious as he was? A turn of the head, a step into that antechamber, and a dozen voices would call out “Aramis.”
Which meant that Monsieur de Treville’s plan had been useless all along.
“I will go out the same way I came,” he told Monsieur de Treville.
And saying this, he perched on the parapet of the window and prepared to jump. The tree was a little ways away, but nothing like what it had been jumping from Violette’s window. And what was more, he could—if he got to the tree—run along it right to the wall. Some of the branches