The Musketeer's Seamstress - By Sarah D'Almeida Page 0,1
was only trickling out now, but it already looked like there was more blood on her than there should be in any human being. “Violette,” he said. “I am offended. This is in extremely poor taste. You must know—”
His hand touched her arm. Before he could control himself, he jumped back, his hands covering his mouth, but not in time to hold back his shocked scream. She felt . . . not exactly cold, but not as warm as living flesh should feel. Blindly, he reached forward, grasped the handle of the knife, pulled it. It came away in his hand, stained red and dripping. It had truly been buried in her flesh. And her skin felt dead.
Aramis knew dead. He’d killed men enough in duel and in combat ever since that day, when he—still known as Chevalier D’Herblay—was barely more than nineteen and a young man had caught him reading the lives of saints to the young man’s sister. Well, at least that was what Aramis still told everyone he had been doing. The truth was somewhere closer to his having demonstrated to the young lady the biblical intricacies of the word know.
The young woman’s brother had objected and challenged D’Herblay for a duel. And D’Herblay, knowing instinctively that his fashionable looks, his command of Latin grammar or even his wielding of sharp rhetoric would not get him out of this situation, had looked for the best fencing master in Paris, Monsieur Pierre Du Vallon. So good had Du Vallon’s lessons proved that D’Herblay had killed the prudish young man. Which, since dueling was forbidden by royal edict and punishable at the end of the executioner’s blade, had led to D’Herblay’s and Du Vallon’s going into hiding under the assumed names of Aramis and Porthos in the uniform of his majesty’s musketeers.
Since then Aramis had fought more duels than he cared to think about. His and Porthos’s acquaintance with a disgraced nobleman who called himself Athos and with a young Gascon hothead called D’Artagnan had done nothing to make his life more peaceful. Among the four of them, one or the other was forever challenging someone to a duel and calling on all his friends to serve as seconds.
He’d killed men, he’d seen corpses—Aramis heard his lips, loudly, mutter a string of Ave Marias—but never one murdered like this, in the safety of her room, in the privacy of her boudoir. And not while only Aramis was present. Not while only Aramis could have done it.
His hand over his mouth, the other hand gripping the bloody knife, he’d backed up until his behind fetched up against one of Violette’s innumerable, amusing little tables, covered in more lace, velvet, satin, and stacked high with books she never read, her command of written French being shaky and her interest in the written word being far secondary to her interest in other pastimes.
Through the roaring in his ears, he was dimly aware that people were knocking at the door and at least one, female voice, was shouting a string of Spanish names, followed by other, equally Spanish words. The names were Violette’s. Her real name was a string of proper names—starting with Ysabella—followed by a string of surnames, all connected by y and de which Aramis could not hope to understand or remember. Ever since—on a cold night, when he stood guard at the royal palace—she’d approached him and told him her name was Violette, he’d called her that and nothing else.
But the knocking on the door seemed like a distant worry. Closer at hand, Aramis was grappling with his soul. Ever since his father had died, when Aramis was no more than two, Aramis’s pious and noble mother had decided her young son was bound for the church. So, wherever his path took him, he dragged with him the excellent, thorough and insistent religious education his mother had given him.
Even now, in uniform for many years, Aramis considered himself a priest in training. As soon as he cleared his name enough for some order to take him, he would take orders.
He was aware of the serious and grave sins he committed with Violette who was, after all, married to some French nobleman living in the far provinces. True, her marriage had been one arranged to match the marriage of the Queen, Anne of Austria, her childhood companion and friend. Violette, to hear her talk, barely knew her husband, with whom she had not spent more than the two weeks of the