Pierre Pevel - By The Alchemist in the Shadows Page 0,85

I would prefer it if you did not sleep here tonight.'

She returned alone to her bedchamber.

Leprat woke up with a severe headache and a devilish thirst. He was lying in his breeches, stockings and shirt, stretched out on a made-up bed in a chamber he had never seen before. He didn't know how he came to be here, but he was sure of one thing: he had left Paris. The air smelled fresh.

The musketeer sat up and, as he rubbed his skull and the handsome bump where he had been struck, he considered his surroundings. His boots were neatly awaiting him by the door. His doublet hung from the back of a chair. His hat was placed upon a table and his sword hung in its scabbard from one of the bedposts. The room was modest but clean and quiet, plunged into an agreeable shade by the curtains that obscured the window.

As he stood, Leprat noticed that the pockets of his breeches had been turned inside out and he concluded that his boots had probably been removed to make sure he was not concealing anything inside them. That made him think of his doublet and he hastened to feel the lining. It was empty and he saw that it had been carefully unsewn. The people who had knocked him out and brought him here had stolen all the secret documents he was supposed to deliver personally to the duchesse de Chevreuse. His career as the queen mother's agent had not got off to a very good start.

Except, despite what the nasty blow to his head seemed to portend, he was neither dead nor a prisoner. If he had been unmasked, he would not have woken here in this manner. Indeed, he would perhaps not have woken at all.

A cow lowed outside.

Leprat went to part the curtains and was dazzled for a moment by the flood of light that suddenly poured into the room. Then he gradually began to make out a pleasant rural landscape, but one which failed to evoke any particular incmories in him. He still didn't know where he was, except that he was looking at a corner of the countryside from the upper storey of a house located at the entrance to a village or small town. And if his day's growth of beard was not lying, he had not slept more than a night and was therefore still in France, probably not far from Paris.

But apart from that . . .

Determined to find out more, Leprat dressed and put on his baldric, finding Gueret's steel sword to be much heavier than his ivory rapier, and then left the room. He descended some stairs and emerged into a charming, sunlit garden where he found, eating at a small table beneath a canopy, the man in the beige doublet who had approached him in The Bronze Glaive.

The gentleman rose as soon as he caught sight of Leprat and welcomed him with an open smile.

'Monsieur de Gueret! How are you feeling? Did you sleep well?'

'Fairly well, yes,' replied Leprat, who still did not know what lack he should adopt in these circumstances.

'I'm delighted to hear that. Join me, please.' The gentleman pointed to an empty chair at his table and sat back down. 'I've just returned from Paris and finally found time to eat. Will you share this late breakfast with me?'

'Certainly.'

'I am the chevalier de Mirebeau and you are here in my home.'

'Your home, which is to say . . . ?'

'In Ivry. Paris is little more than a league from here.'

Leprat sat down at the table and discovered he possessed a healthy appetite.

'Bertrand!' called the gentleman. 'Bertrand!'

A stooped and rather dreary-looking lackey appeared in the doorway.

'Yes, monsieur?'

'A glass for monsieur de Gueret.'

'Very good, monsieur.'

And tearing a leg from a chicken, Mirebeau said:

'I imagine you have many questions. I don't know if I can answer all of them just yet, but I owe you an apology for the nasty trick we played on you last night. I can only hope that Rauvin did not strike you too hard . . .'

'Rauvin?'

'You will meet him soon. The man has a tendency to be . . . zealous about his work. And he has an excessive, indeed, almost unnatural, sense of wariness ... In short, it's down to him that you were knocked out—'

'Knocked out and searched.'

'You realise we needed to assure ourselves that you were in fact who you claimed to be. As for the documents you were carrying,