The Musketeer's Seamstress - By Sarah D'Almeida Page 0,2

wedding festivities. He enjoyed rural pleasures, and she’d lingered at court with her friend the Queen. And she’d found Aramis.

And there, Aramis thought, lay the crux of the sin, for they’d sinned often and in very imaginative ways. And had not, perhaps, some angel reached from heaven to smite with ivory dagger the cleft between Violette’s perfect breasts?

But the banging on the door grew more insistent and Aramis’s knowledge of Latin allowed him to guess that the Spanish-speaking woman wished to know who had screamed and why. She would not be appeased by anything but Violette’s voice. A voice that would not be heard, again, till the angel of the apocalypse sounded the final trumpet.

Naked, scared, shocked, Aramis stood and stared at the door which shook under the impact of many hands, many fists.

Cold sweat ran down his face. He felt his hand tremble. He’d never trembled in battlefield or field of honor, but this . . . This supernatural retribution, he could not endure.

And yet, if an angel had struck, would he not have killed both of them while they were abandoned to their pleasure? And why would an angel wait until Aramis went to the little room to attend a call of nature?

Despite his education—or perhaps because of it, for, after all, it had included logic—Aramis had an analytical mind which shouted over the vapors of his fear and the madness of his religious guilt to tell him that a human hand had killed Violette. A human hand not Aramis’s.

Perhaps, he thought, there was a tunnel into this room? After all, any palace of any age at all had more tunnels, secret passages and hidden rooms than a rabbit warren had exits.

But, looking around the room, he could not imagine where the tunnel would open. Every available palm length of wall had one of Violette’s cabinets, tables, chaises leaning against it. And all of it was solid, heavy Spanish furniture which would not be moved by a simple door springing open behind it.

And now a man pounded on the door and called out in French, “Madame, madame, if you do not open we’ll be forced to break down the door.”

Aramis, well versed in the art of ordering palace staff knew that it would only be a matter of minutes before some sturdy lads were brought forth and their shoulders applied to the door. The lock was solid, but not that solid. It would open. And they would catch him here. Alone. With Violette’s corpse.

How long before the gibbet was built and he was hanged? Or would he be lucky enough to be beheaded? One of his long, pale hands went, unmeant, to his long, elegant neck.

It would kill his mother.

He edged towards the balcony door. It was the only way out. And that not a true way out. All he could hope for was to fall to the hard ground that would break his body. But at least he wouldn’t die on the gallows or the block. He would not bring that shame onto his mother.

Filled with a decision he could only half muster, his hands tore at the door, forcing it open.

The warm air of spring rushed in on him, a scent of trees and grass and, beyond that, the scent of manure and cooking fires that was the essence of the great, bustling city of Paris.

His ears unnaturally sharpened by his fear, he could hear somewhere on the grounds of the palace the rough laughter of musketeers on guard and the sound of dice being tumbled. Was Athos or Porthos on guard tonight? He could not remember. Truth was he could not remember what day it was anymore and his normally perfect knowledge of his friends’ guard schedules had slipped wholly from his mind.

In the end, his wit, which had always been his defense, would desert him. The sound of the knocks on the door changed. Ah. Sturdy shoulders applied with a will.

Aramis stepped out onto the balcony, which was semicircular, built of stone and surrounded with little cylindrical columns of stone topped by a carefully edged parapet.

The polished stone felt rough against his nakedness, as he leaned over to look three stories below, to the paving of an ornamental patio surrounded by flowerbeds. On one of the flowerbeds, in front of the balcony, a lone tree stood, filled with the kind of tender green leaves that spring fostered, leaves still small enough that one could see the tree branches thrust skyward like the hands of