seemed to overhang the wall or close enough. That meant he could leave here, and not go around to one of the entrances that were doubtless watched.
If he took minimal precautions, to jump when the street was not busy, no one would notice.
And then . . . And then he would make his way to Porthos’s house—the one that offered the best view of its front door, being situated on an ample, broad street.
He’d hide on the other side of the street, in some doorway. And contrive to intercept Porthos or Mousqueton, before they got to the door. Hopefully before they fell within observation of whoever had been set up to observe the door.
It wasn’t a wonderful plan, but it would have to do.
Aramis jumped towards the thin limb of the tree.
The Drawback of Good Jewelry Stores; The Horrible Suspicion; Attacked in the Night
ATHOS had been to most of the jewelry stores, or at least to most of those that were still open at night and which either had some ivory piece in the window or had been recommended to him as being knowledgeable in ivory.
Before starting on his quest, he’d taken the trouble to stop at a public water fountain and wash from the dagger any vestige of blood. No reason to excite the curiosity of the jewelers about the use to which the dagger had been put.
A connoisseur of blades, or at least a frequent user of them, Athos felt somewhat guilty washing the fine metal in cold water. But there was no oil nor polishing compound on hand. So water would have to do for now. And water was, doubtless, better than blood on the blade and the handle.
Naked of its red patina, the dagger handle looked almost white, with only that slight tinge that ivory always had to it. Athos, examining it under the flickering light of a lantern over the nearest shop, had thought that it was new ivory.
The owner of the very first shop he visited, one of the better shops, with an actual display of jewelry up front, and a guard beside it, had agreed. He’d also looked from the dagger to Athos’s worn musketeer’s uniform and frowned.
“How did you come by this?” he asked. “Won it at the die?”
Athos had thrown back his head and assumed his most haughty expression. He’d been using it long enough and in enough varied circumstances to know that when he looked that regal it intimidated even the most hardened of noblemen, much less a lowly shopkeeper, not matter how grand he thought himself.
“It is hardly any business of yours to interrogate a King’s musketeer,” he said.
The man visibly shrunk from the words and, probably—if Athos knew himself—from the glimmer of anger in the musketeer’s eyes. It was well known all over Paris that offending a musketeer could very well get your ears cut. Or—if you were so unlucky and a lot of them were nearby and drunk enough to react with furor at whatever trivial insult one of them had suffered—you might get your shop and house burned down.
The jeweler looked towards his guard, but he was not so foolish as to imagine that this down-at-heels man could hold his own against a musketeer. He polished the dagger handle on his sleeve and passed it to Athos, handle first. “It’s fine work,” he said. “But we don’t do anything like it, and know next to nothing about it. If you want to talk to someone about ivory work, you should go down the street, to my brother-in-law at the sign of the Lit Candle. He is the man to talk to about ivory.”
And so Athos had gone, from shop to shop, and from jeweler to jeweler, until the last of the shops sent him to a place that wasn’t even on jewelers’ row, but on a side alley.
The shop was clearly not very prosperous. Indeed, on first approach, Athos thought they were quite closed and no more than the door of yet another home.
The alley on which it was located reeked strongly of urine and vomit both, since it made a convenient pass-through between two streets where taverns abounded. And the only light there was the light that came from the lanterns of those distant taverns.
He looked at the dingy door that looked as though it were in the terminal stages of wood rot. Set in a wall that was probably stone but seemed like caked dirt, it looked unappetizing in the extreme. If you concentrated