Death in Gascony

“E
N GARDE
,”
Monsieur Henri D’Artagnan said, as he danced back to a defensive position, and lifted his own sword. “Unsheathe your swords.”

Facing him, under the pale yellow sun of early autumn, outraging him with their presence on the outskirts of Paris, just outside the convent of the Barefoot Carmelites, three guards of Cardinal Richelieu pointedly did
not
unsheathe.

Instead, the lead one, a middle-aged blond, looked from D’Artagnan to—behind the young guard—the three musketeers who stood, staring at the scene with varying expressions of amusement.

“But, monsieur,” the guard of the Cardinal said, lifting his hat and scratching at the sparse blond hair beneath. “All I did was remind you of the edicts against dueling. How would this justify
dueling
with you?”

D’Artagnan hesitated, his internal conflict visible only in a straightening of his shoulders and a sharp look up. Seventeen years old, with the lank dark hair and bright dark eyes of his native Gascony, D’Artagnan was muscular and lean like a fine horse. And as in a fine horse, every one of his thoughts was obvious in movement, in stance, in a tossing of the head or a quick glance. He knew this. He was aware of his body’s betraying his impatience.

“It seems to me,” a mannered, cultivated voice said from behind D’Artagnan, “that you have offered our friend a great insult, monsieur guard.”

It was a voice that would have sounded very well coming out of a pulpit and explaining in rounded phrases some obscure point of theology. The gentleman who spoke, so far from looking like a priest, was a tall, well-built blond, whose hair, falling in waves to his waist, shone from brushing.

His clothes, in the last cry of fashion, boasted a doublet that was only vaguely that of the musketeer’s uniform. Though blue, it was made of patterned satin, and crisscrossed with enough ribbon to adorn several court dresses. More ribbons adorned his sleeves and hung in fetching knots from wrist closures. A profusion of silver buttons shone like the ice that sparkled from the ground on this cold November morning.

His name was Aramis and despite the languid speech and the intent gaze he now bent upon his perfectly manicured nails, he was known as one of the most dangerous blades in the King’s Musketeers and a breaker of ladies’ hearts. It was said he was pursued by princesses, courted by duchesses, and that a foreign queen had sent him the expensive jewel that dazzled from his exquisitely plumed hat.

D’Artagnan knew Aramis well enough that he did not need to turn to know that his friend’s bright green eyes shone with mischief. Aramis was enjoying this. His enjoyment did not help D’Artagnan calm down.

“Indeed,” another of the musketeers said. He was as tall as Aramis, but of quite a different type. His clothes were in the fashion of decades ago—a tightly laced doublet and old-fashioned knee breeches that displayed, below the knees, muscular legs encased in mended stockings.

This musketeer’s curly hair—a black so dark as to appear blue in certain lights—was tightly pulled back and tied roughly with a scrap of leather. His pale skin betrayed the slight creasing around the eyes, the lines around the mouth that showed him the oldest one of those present—and as not having lived an easy life.

Looking back over his shoulder, D’Artagnan saw that his friend’s smile was guarded, but that his dark blue eyes sparkled with as much mischief as those of Aramis. His name was Athos, though D’Artagnan had found that in another life—before he’d joined the musketeers to expiate what he considered his unforgivable crime—he’d been the Count de la Fere, scion of one of the oldest families in the realm.

His nobility showed now, as he advanced a foot and tossed back his head. Despite his mended clothes, he was very much the grand seigneur as he said, “I think these gentlemen owe you an apology, D’Artagnan.”

“What I don’t understand,” the third musketeer said, his voice booming over the landscape and making the guards jump, “is why they assume we were dueling, I mean…” He paused, struggling for words.

This enmity with language was the trademark of Porthos and despite his present anger D’Artagnan couldn’t help smiling slightly at hearing it. It often made people think Porthos stupid, but very few would tell it to his face, because Porthos looked like a Norse god. Much taller than his companions—or indeed than anyone else—with broad shoulders and a muscular body capable of feats of strength to rival those of mythology, Porthos could not be made more splendid by wrapping himself in finery. This didn’t stop him trying.

Norsemen had dreamed of such as him in the guise of Thor, working an eternal forge. They probably had failed to imagine his gilded baldric, the rope of gold that surrounded the brim of his hat, or the multiple jewels that flashed from each of his powerful fingers. Most of them glass, if D’Artagnan knew his friend, but splendid-looking nonetheless.

Porthos shook his head, giving the impression of utter bewilderment, as he asked the guards, “
Mort Dieu
, can’t four friends meet to go to a dinner without bringing you down on them with your edicts and your…your…
dents Dieu
, I know not what to say…Your regulations? The precious orders of your…Cardinal?”

“But, monsieurs…” The guard pointed out reasonably. “Surely…” He shrugged, not in a show of lack of knowledge, so much as in total bewilderment. His bewilderment, his meek pose were an affront to D’Artagnan’s mind and heart. “Monsieurs, surely—” He looked around at the immediate surroundings, where the scuffed ground, two broken swords, and a trail of blood leading, tellingly, to the door of the convent, all spoke of a recent fray. “Surely you see…There’s been a duel here.”

“Oh, and if there’s been a duel, we must be to blame, eh? Very pretty reasoning that,” Porthos boomed. “That’s the musketeers. Always dueling. Easy thought. And wrong. We were going to dinner.”

D’Artagnan, who found none of this funny, and whose bloodlust was rising at the guard’s refusal to face him, spoke only through clenched teeth, to repeat yet again, “En garde.”

“But—” the guard said, and opened his hands in a show of desperation. His companions, two smaller, darker men, stood with hands on the hilts of their swords, but did not draw.

Aramis sighed, heavily—the sort of world-weary sigh that could be expected from a man who claimed that he was wearing the uniform of a musketeer only temporarily, until he could attain his ambition of becoming a priest. Hearing of it, no one could guess that his seminary education had been interrupted years ago when a gentleman had found Aramis reading the lives of saints—at least that was what he swore he’d been doing—to the gentleman’s wellborn sister and challenged Aramis to a duel, thereby forcing Aramis to kill him.

“If you must know,” he said, looking up from an intent examination of his nails and speaking in a voice that implied that no well-bred person would push the point so far. “We heard the moans of the injured and we stopped to render assistance. I am, as you have probably heard, all but in orders, and I thought perhaps I could give some comfort to the dying.”

The guards looked from one to the other. “You’re telling us that you came to help these other men?”

“Very good of us, it was,” Porthos boomed. “In fact we behaved like true Philistines.”

The guards looked up at him with disbelief, and even D’Artagnan was forced to look over his shoulder at his giant, redheaded friend.

“I believe you mean Samaritans, Porthos,” Aramis said, and coughed.

“Do I?” Porthos said, then waved airily. “All the same, I say. All those people were the same, anyway. Always giving their aunt’s wife’s donkey in marriage to each other.” And with such a cryptic pronouncement, he said, “D’Artagnan, if they apologize, will you let them go?”

D’Artagnan shook his head. No. No and no and no. Their very apologies would only enrage him. The truth was that the guards had come—of course—just at the conclusion of a duel arranged by the musketeers the day before. They’d arrived just after the musketeers had dispatched their opponents and helped the wounded carry the dead to the convent.

And now they persisted in their nonsensical quest to arrest the musketeers—without drawing swords, without raising their voices, without, in fact, even calling attention to Porthos’s blood-smeared sleeve or the noticeable tear that rent the sleeve of Athos’s doublet on the right side.

They not only had found out that the musketeers were going to duel—in itself this was not a great mystery, since the duel had been called in a tavern over a handful of noblemen’s refusal to drink to the King’s health—but they refused to fight.

D’Artagnan’s scornful gaze accessed the guards’ middle-aged countenances, their pasty faces, the fact that each of them carried the sort of extra weight that a few duels a month burned off. He judged them to be nobodies. The type of nobodies given a post in the guards to appease some family connection or some powerful nobleman.

They wouldn’t fight because they couldn’t. And if D’Artagnan slaughtered them all, the best to be hoped for would be that he would become everywhere known as a killer of the defenseless. There was no honor in a killing such as this. There would only be shame in winning; but losing was unthinkable.

Sending these men to arrest musketeers was, in fact, not only an insult, but a cunning ploy of the Cardinal’s. The sort of ploy that the snake who ruled behind the throne of France was well known for. And D’Artagnan’s friends didn’t even see it.

D’Artagnan stamped his foot, in hatred of the Cardinal and in fury and frustration at his friends. “Draw, or I slaughter you where you stand,” he said, knowing only that to back out would be shame and to continue forward would be disaster. He was caught in the Cardinal’s trap.

The sound of running feet didn’t intrude into his mind. He did not look until a well known voice called, breathlessly, from the side, “Monsieur, monsieur.”

D’Artagnan turned. Planchet had been left safely in D’Artagnan’s lodging, at the Rue des Fossoyers. Planchet would not come here, like this, much less think of interrupting a duel without very grave reason. Reason so grave that D’Artagnan couldn’t even imagine it.

All this was in his mind, not in full thoughts—not fully in words—as he turned, sword still in hand, still lifted, to see his servant—his bright red hair standing on end, his dark suit dusty and stained as if he’d run the whole way here—leaning forward, hands on knees, a respectful distance from him. “Planchet, what is it?”

And the guards attacked. D’Artagnan heard the sound of swords sliding from their sheathes and turned. He was barely in time to meet head-on the clumsy rush of the blond guard.

“Ah, coward,” he said, only vaguely aware that Porthos and Aramis had joined the fray on either side of him, taking on the blond’s assistants. D’Artagnan parried a thrust and made a very accurate thrust of his own, slitting the man’s doublet from top to bottom and ending by flipping his hat off his head. “Would you duel with a real man?” he said.

The blond had a moment to look aghast at his torn clothing, cut with such precision as not to touch the flesh beneath, and to bend upon D’Artagnan a gaze of the purest horror. His lips worked, but no sound emerged.

And D’Artagnan, his mind viewing the man and his fear as only a move in his chess game with the Cardinal, thought he glimpsed an opening, a way out of the trap of honor in which he found himself. He lunged forward, saying, “You think you can stand up against the musketeers? Don’t you think it will take more than that to face the men who have so often proved superior to his eminence’s best guards?”

“That’s right,” Porthos said. He had, with easy bluster, inflicted a minor wound on his opponent’s arm, and was grinning, as he prepared to parry a counterattack that might very well never come. “That’s right. We’d rather die. Be cut to pieces right here, than allow you to arrest us.”

“At any rate, monsieurs,” Aramis said, from D’Artagnan’s right. “It would be a more merciful and quicker way to die to allow ourselves to be killed here than to face the wrath of Monsieur de Treville.” There was still a tremolo of amusement to his voice, and D’Artagnan wondered if Aramis had begun to glimpse both the trap and the way out. Or if he, cunning as he was, had seen it all along, and before D’Artagnan did. “So we die here, monsieurs, but you cannot arrest us.”

And in that second something broke in the leader’s eyes. He looked down at his torn doublet that showed a dubiously clean linen shirt beneath, then he looked quickly up at D’Artagnan. And then his sword clattered to the ground and, before D’Artagnan could gracefully accept his surrender, the man had taken to his heels, running fast over the ice-crusted fields, slipping and standing and slipping again.

His men, clearly treasuring following their leader over valor, dropped their swords, so fast they seemed like echoes of his, and did their best to catch up with him.

“Well played, D’Artagnan,” Aramis said. “I was wondering when you’d see their surrender, or preferably their flight, was the only way out of this for us. At least the only way with honor.” His lazy smile, the paternal tone of his words, implied that he’d seen this all along. D’Artagnan wondered if it was true. With Aramis it wasn’t easy to say. Aramis himself might not know.

“Poor devils,” Porthos said, looking after the fleeing men. “They were as set up for this as we were. And the wrath they face from the Cardinal makes what we’d face at Monsieur de Treville’s hands seem almost gentle.” He took a deep breath, straining the expanse of his broad chest. “The affront is the Cardinal’s. I wish it were possible to challenge him for a duel.”

“He was a good enough duelist in his youth,” Aramis said, his tone deceptively light.

And D’Artagnan wondered if his mad friends, who hated the Cardinal for many good reasons as well as many foolish ones, would suddenly decide to challenge the Cardinal.

He opened his mouth to remind them that men such as his eminence didn’t fight with their swords but with the might of the kingdom, when Athos spoke, “D’Artagnan, attend. This is grave business.” He held a letter in his hand—its seal broken—and waved it slightly in D’Artagnan’s direction.