Death in Gascony (10 page)

A
THOS
had washed and dressed in clean clothes, after his travel, only to find his friends seemed all to be engaged in some sort of pursuit.

He understood well enough the weight that must suddenly have come to rest on D’Artagnan’s shoulders. There was the house to take over, the mass of accounts and papers to go through. Athos knew very well what he would face, should the unlikely day ever come in which he returned to his position as Comte de la Fere.

Just the thought of it gave him a pang of longing for his comfortable office, with its lighted fire, his paperwork, the life he’d been trained for.

But he was better aware than anyone could be to know that the path home was barred to him. He’d dishonored his family, his name and himself, by killing a defenseless woman. At least, at the time, he’d thought himself to be executing a judgement upon an escaped criminal who had lied her way into marrying him. Now he wasn’t so sure. And while he wasn’t sure—while, in fact, he held himself guilty of murder—he refused to stain the home of his ancestors with his presence.

Could he have gone home—or rather, had his life not entered this strange byway—he’d have sons. And his son would be a lot like D’Artagnan. At least he would if Athos had anything to say to it.

Since he could never go home and never resume his ancestral duties, D’Artagnan was the closest he would ever have to a son. As such, it behooved Athos to find out in what circumstances D’Artagnan’s father had died.

At first, when reading of the duel, he’d thought that the man had simply fallen victim to a not unusual fate. After all, men dueled and when men dueled some of them died. Athos had killed his own share of adversaries.

D’Artagnan’s father had been old. In fact, if he had fought with Henri IV, he had probably been in his fifth or sixth decade. Men that age who had always dueled often forgot that their reflexes had changed and their footing could no longer be depended on.

Athos would be more than ready to consider that Monsieur D’Artagnan père had fallen victim to the combined misfortunes of age and pride, except for one thing. Or rather, except for two things—the two attacks on D’Artagnan on the road here.

Those attacks were enough to make it almost sure someone had killed Monsieur D’Artagnan on purpose and if someone had, then his son was in danger from the same people.

When it came to suspects, it was more complex. There was the dagger with the Bigorre coat of arms in the paid assassin’s hand. How had it come to be there? It would be something from the de Bigorre house. Or this one, since D’Artagnan’s father had been born to the de Bigorre family.

Athos did not want to think of the still-young Madame D’Artagnan. Not that her undeniable beauty aroused any tender feelings in him, but because he wondered if she’d had a reason to wish her husband dead.

But surely, no woman would be unnatural enough to hire assassins to kill her son? Athos, who had read the mythologies of Greece and Rome, grinned at the naive recesses of his mind. Of course some women did just that. His only doubt; his only rational reason to think it couldn’t be so was that note, undeniably signed by Richelieu.

He clutched to that one reason like a drowning man holding onto the proverbial straw.

What could Madame D’Artagnan in her provincial home in Gascony have to do with the Cardinal who ran France from behind the King’s throne?

And yet…

Her letter announcing her husband’s death had said that her husband worked for the Cardinal. What if she’d only said that because she herself worked for his eminence, and wished to attribute such to her husband? What if she’d been trying to muddy the waters so her guilt would be less obvious?

What if, in fact, D’Artagnan’s father had been working for the King and died due to one of those confrontations that daily took place in this kingdom between the devotees of the true King of France and those of the shadow power?

Then surely the attempts against D’Artagnan were explained? If Madame D’Artagnan were the Cardinal’s agent, then her son, who was devoted to the King and his musketeers, was likely to thwart her plans when he arrived. And if that was the case, there was not even any need for Madame D’Artagnan to have attempted to kill her son.

It sufficed for her to have sent a note to her master in Paris. He would then of his own accord have hired assassins and tried to stop D’Artagnan from reaching his domains.

Athos sighed. After all, most of his suspicions were founded on very little beyond her anxious insistence that her husband was very old, an odd glint in her eye and her age and beauty. Not enough. Too well did Athos know that he was likely to condemn a woman unjustly.

“Grimaud,” he said, calling to his servant, who emerged from the shadows where he’d waited since he’d laid his master’s clothing out on the bed. “Tell me, what is the name of the live-in servant? The one who was Monsieur D’Artagnan père’s servant in the war?”

“Bayard,” Grimaud said.

“And did he seem to you talkative?”

Grimaud shrugged. “On the subject of horses and battles, as garrulous as you could hope, Monsieur le Comte.”

Athos nodded. “Well, then, we’ll start with horses and battles. And we’ll see what else he has to say.”

Grimaud didn’t ask or argue further. It was one of his admirable qualities—and one in which Athos had carefully trained him—that he could go for days without talking at all, and had learned to obey his master’s gestures, when Athos himself found that words were unnecessary.

“Where is he?” Athos asked.

“In the stables, last I saw him,” Grimaud answered.

Athos allowed Grimaud to lead him to the stables, a vast space under one of the wings of the house. Well aware that D’Artagnan had come to Paris on one of the funniest horses God had ever created—ill-proportioned, all knees, and covered in the most horrible of yellow orange pelts—Athos was surprised to find several horses in the stable, besides five of the ones they’d brought with them.

There were at least ten very beautiful Arabians, with nervous legs and shining hides. Bayard was brushing one of these, talking to it in an undertone in that Gascon language to which natives seemed to revert when they thought no one from outside the region could hear them.

He looked up at Athos’s entrance and bowed slightly. “Monsieur,” he said.

“Hello, Bayard,” Athos said. “What a very beautiful mare you have there. Was she born and bred in this house?”

Bayard shook his head. “Not her. We’ve only owned her for about four months.” He looked around, slightly bewildered. “All of these horses, in fact. Before that we had only my master’s old horse, which, as they say, has joined the battle eternal. And that horse’s grandson, a fine mount but of a strange color most closely approaching orange, and all odd looking, if you know what I mean.”

Athos nodded. Having seen the horse, he unfortunately knew. “So you bought all these just recently? Was your master intending to go into the horse breeding business?”

Bayard shrugged. “Not business as such, you know. He was a nobleman. Not a man of business. But he liked horses, and his father used to breed them, and he thought he could…breed a few of them. Keep the house in mounts and perhaps generate a little income.

“He used to tell me, the way Monsieur D’Artagnan was with the girls, there was but no telling that he would find some woman to marry while in Paris, and come back here to raise a passel of brats, and we might as well have some way of ensuring they would not all starve.” He looked stricken. “My poor master.”

“You served him long,” Athos said, finding a place to lean against one of the stall doors.

“Oh, yes. He first hired me here, and I stayed with him through all the wars of religion and all. Even in Paris. Only then we came here, and we both married, and you see how it was.”

“I suppose your wife served with Madame D’Artagnan,” Athos said.

Bayard sniffed. “With Madame D’Artagnan sure. But not this one.”

“Oh? There was another?”

“Oh, yes, there was another, much superior to the present. A real Madame D’Artagnan. She died, poor thing, in childbirth. And the babe with her. And then, but ten years later, my master he up and gets this one. Well, I hope he liked the bargain he made. Not, but I’m sure she led him to an early grave. And she didn’t even go to his funeral. Says that funeral services just make her ill. Fact is, she never cared for him.”

Athos did not want to suspect D’Artagnan’s mother. But neither could he stop himself from asking, “How so?”

“Well…I’m not one to talk.” Another sniffle. “And that’s women’s gossip, anyway, but with one thing and another, I’d not be surprised if she worried him half out of his mind.”

“He did not die of worrying,” Athos said.

“No. He died of a duel. And it was all her fault.”

This was far more interesting, and besides, while Athos was trying hard not to suspect Madame D’Artagnan, it didn’t mean he couldn’t suspect some man who pined for her affections and who might have killed her husband—and attempted to kill her son—in order to achieve her hand in marriage.

“How was the duel because of her?”

“Well, then,” Bayard said, and brushed the horse with a will. “Did the lord not die fighting with that Monsieur de Bilh? And did I not see Monsieur de Bilh, more than once, at our gates, talking to madam? Ah, it’s all very well for him to tell us that he comes over because he has some boundary dispute with my master.” He made a sound like spitting. “Boundary dispute. I ask you. How many men with a boundary dispute find it necessary to come to the house when the master isn’t there?” He shook his head. “My wife says that I am imagining things, but I say…I say she doesn’t know. Other women gossip, you see, but my wife doesn’t. She’s a good woman. But I tell you, there’s no smoke without fire.”

He finished brushing the horse and led her to a stall. “What I say,” he said, turning around, “is that whether she meant it or not, that woman has a lot to do with her husband lying—such as he was—in the crypt. Because, you see, even if she didn’t mean nothing by it, she smiled at him a lot. And men like that de Bilh are likely to take that the wrong way.” He sniffed. “My master never had no dispute with Monsieur de Bilh, boundary or not, and if he’d challenged him for a duel, he’d have told me and taken me with him. No. That was too sudden. And no one who’d seen Monsieur D’Artagnan duel would believe that a stripling like de Bilh could run him through either. He’s killed a dozen men better than de Bilh. I tell you, monsieur, it was treason and done as treason. They came at him, when he was not expecting it, I’m sure of it, and killed him before he knew it.”

Athos inclined his head. Was it possible that someone had taken a fancy to beautiful, young-looking Madame D’Artagnan, and for her sake killed her husband and attempted to kill her son? It was possible, but it left unexplained the letter from the Cardinal found on the first set of attackers.

“So he’d never fought with this Monsieur de Bilh.”

“Boundary disputes,” Bayard said and snorted. “As if Monsieur D’Artagnan could ever have cared about his land’s boundaries. He always said as they weren’t much to look on, and that a man couldn’t properly stretch in them without putting his foot on the neighbor’s land. And he told Monsieur Henri, he told him, ‘Son go to Paris and make your fortune there. Forget these lands. If you ever inherit them, they’re barely worth the trouble. Unless you make a fortune to add to your inheritance.’” Another snort.

“So your master expected my friend to make his fortune in war?”

“In war or in the city. To do something, he said, that would get him noticed by the King, and get him some great boon. Many is the times he told me—very proud of that boy he was, and with good reason—that Monsieur Henri would make us bigger than de Bigorre, and that he’d rather have that one son than his brother’s inheritance. Now, does that sound like a man who would duel another over boundary disputes?”

Athos shook his head. It seemed interesting to him that Bayard approved of D’Artagnan, even if he disapproved of his mother. A thought flashed in his mind, and he said, “Is Monsieur…uh…Henri the son of this Madame D’Artagnan?”

Bayard compressed his lips and nodded. “You wouldn’t believe it, would you? But he is, and that much more worthy than her, that it almost makes up for the trouble she causes. Except bringing on my master’s death of course.”

“Of course,” Athos said. He didn’t think he’d get anything more out of the cantankerous old man—or at least nothing else with any value. At any rate, he had much to think about. He wondered if it was all venom, or if there was anything in the relationship between Madame D’Artagnan and the man who had killed her husband. “I suppose I should go within and ready for supper.”

At the door to the stables, he thought of something else—something that had been nagging at the back of his mind. “Oh,” he said. “I meant to ask. How did your master buy all these horses all of a sudden? Why not before Monsieur Henri left?”

The servant looked at him as if he had taken leave of his senses. “He didn’t buy the horses, Monsieur. The Cardinal and the King sent them to him as a gift.”

I
T
had taken D’Artagnan a good while to be able to pick up the note, signed by the Cardinal. It seemed to him such a strange, incongruous thing to find in his father’s papers, that he half expected it to vanish like smoke before his eyes.

Perhaps he was still feverish. It was possible. Perhaps he hadn’t realized it, but the wound had become infected again.

It was impossible that his father kept a safe-conduct from the Cardinal, and one worded in the exact same terms as the one that had been found in the pockets of the henchmen who’d attacked D’Artagnan.

Yet the note didn’t vanish. It persisted in being impossibly solid and improbably signed by Richelieu. At long last, D’Artagnan folded it and put it within his sleeve. He stole a quick look at Mousqueton, who was, mercifully, looking out the window.

“Ah,” D’Artagnan said, rising from his knees. “I see they are returning, and, indeed, supper will be soon enough. Perhaps I’ll have the time for an interview with my mother before dinner. You see…accounts and…such.”

Mousqueton nodded without asking anything—which in D’Artagnan’s experience, he wouldn’t anyway. The man had a way of guessing things and knowing them without ever asking as such. Not so very different, in fact, from his way of finding just the chickens—and bottles of wine, and legs of lamb—that a carriage had just run over and which needed to be put out of their misery.

He followed D’Artagnan out of the room and, at D’Artagnan’s instruction, locked the door with his improvised tools. He smiled then, and said, “I normally don’t have to do this.”

They climbed down the staircase to the floor below, where they parted ways, Mousqueton saying he needed to help his master dress for supper. For all D’Artagnan knew, it was true. Porthos had brought twice as much luggage as the rest of them and, knowing his habits of sartorial splendor, might very well require a servant to fit his clothes or outfit him with jewels or whatever he deemed necessary to present himself in proper style.

As for D’Artagnan, he walked slowly, pensively, to the door of his mother’s bedroom, where he knocked.

“Come in,” his mother said, and in he went.

His mother’s room was the largest in the house—a vast expanse surrounded by whitewashed walls and taken up with a confusion of furniture. There was the large, curtained bed, some clothes trunks, a large wardrobe, a small, amusing set of shelves, several lavishly upholstered chairs and, finally, a dressing table with a vast mirror that his father had once told him came from Venice.

His mother sat in her dressing gown at her vanity, while Marguerite pinned her hair up in some complex style that appeared to be designed to look like she’d just carelessly pulled her hair up, allowing a curl or two to escape.

Something in D’Artagnan protested that she took too much care of her appearance for a woman so recently widowed, but another part—the saner part—told him it was all nonsense. His earliest memories were of sitting on the floor in this room watching his beautiful mother prepare for supper in her own house and making herself beautiful as though she were appearing at court.

He remembered how proud his father had been of his mother’s beauty and her youth, and he smiled at his mother as he sat down on the floor beside her dressing table.

She smiled at him, in turn, as though she knew the memories in his mind, then sobered, suddenly. “I am sorry, son, that you had to come all this way, and over such distressing news too. But I am sure once you have had time to look over your father’s accounts, and once all the rights of inheritance are established, you can leave again.”

D’Artagnan started. “Leave again? Leave my domains and my duty behind?”

She smiled at him, but the smile lingered a little too long, like someone posing for a painting. “Of course. How big are your domains that they need you here the whole time? Son, I believe I know how to oversee the harvest and how to receive the rents from your tenants. This is not a duchy that you need to be here at all times, ready to defend it or take your people to war.”

D’Artagnan frowned, “But in your letter, you said…”

She shrugged. “In my letter I said a lot of nonsense, I am sure,” she said. “I was in shock you see.” For a moment, for just a moment, her face mirrored that shock, in suddenly raised eyebrows and an astonished expression. D’Artagnan could not doubt he was seeing her as she’d looked when she’d got the news of her husband’s death. “I didn’t expect it. It was the most extraordinary thing. He never told me he’d challenged anyone for a duel, and Monsieur de Bilh, yet. I mean, you remember how they were, always joking about their boundary dispute in the south vineyard, and drinking unending bottles of wine together on the strength of it.”

D’Artagnan frowned. His memories of Monsieur de Bilh, who was his father’s contemporary and friend, were slightly different. Oh, he did drop by the house and spend long afternoons drinking with Monsieur D’Artagnan père. But he and D’Artagnan’s father also carried on long, incomprehensible feuds over a few feet on that south vineyard.

The only thing that could be said about the two men was that they were either the best of friends or the bitterest of enemies. No one else seemed to be able to predict who would be what, or in what way or when. Sometimes D’Artagnan thought even the two of them weren’t always sure if they were on good terms with each other or not.

He inclined his head. “It was a sudden duel then? Without provocation?”

His mother shrugged. “I don’t know. I know he didn’t tell me any of it. But he was getting very strange, Henri. He was spending most of his days up in that tower of his. He said he was doing paperwork, but what paperwork could he have to do all of a sudden? So he might have decided to duel de Bilh and not to tell me. Besides…” She shrugged and blushed a little. “He knew that I would tell him he was an old fool and that there was no reason at all to duel the poor man who’d never done anything to him.”

D’Artagnan frowned. He’d often heard his mother chastise his father in just exactly those terms. What he’d never seen was his father making any effort to avoid being chastised. He’d kept on dueling and drinking. But then again, it had been a long time since he’d been home. And he knew, from observing other people—Bayard and Marguerite among them—that sometimes people changed when their children left the parental abode. Perhaps that had happened with his parents.

“Or perhaps my father just seemed strange because of his dealings with Richelieu?”

His mother jumped a little. He would swear to it. Just the slightest jerk of the body, and the curl of her blond hair escaped between Marguerite’s fingers, and fell, causing the servant to exclaim.

But it was all in a moment, and when D’Artagnan looked again his mother was composed and showing only surprise. “Richelieu?” she said, in some alarm. “The Cardinal? Why do you think your father was working for the Cardinal?”

“
Maman
. You know you told me in your note that he was working for the Cardinal.”

She dismissed her note with a wave of her hand. “I told you before,” she said, her voice sounding distressed. “I don’t know what I wrote in that note. I was so shocked and confused, and scared, you know, of…everything. Did I truly tell you he was working for the Cardinal?”

D’Artagnan nodded.

“Oh, what a very silly thing to do,” she said. And managed a very creditable peal of musical laughter. “Why would your father be working for the Cardinal? What would his eminence want from the depths of Gascony? What interest could he have here?”

“I don’t know,” D’Artagnan said, while he tried to think over the situation. His mother was not only lying to him, she was giving the most creditable theatrical performance he’d seen from anyone in a long time, cunning Aramis included. In fact, the only reason he suspected her was that slight jerk of the body that he might or might not have seen. That and the note rustling inside his sleeve every time he moved his arm. “Perhaps being so near to Spain he thought my father could get him information on Spanish noblemen. How am I to know? In Paris they say even the owls and the rats spy for the Cardinal. So why not here?”

His mother frowned. “Well, I assure you…that is…I don’t know of any work your father was doing for the Cardinal, nor of any reason for him to be doing so.”

D’Artagnan realized she had worded her answer carefully enough so as not to lie openly to him. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

If he’d not spent six months in Paris and there been exposed to the guile of the masters in perfidy—Richelieu included—would he even have suspected his mother’s careful prevarication?

“So, I assume you wouldn’t know what this is about,” he said, and, reaching into his sleeve, pinched the small piece of paper in between his fingers, and showed it to his mother at a distance.

She squinted at it. “No,” she said. “I can’t read it from this far, but I’ve never seen it.” She blushed faintly and, D’Artagnan realized, was probably lying. Why else had she kept her husband’s study locked and not given the key to D’Artagnan as soon as he arrived? “What does it say?”

“It says,” D’Artagnan said. “‘It was by my order and for the good of the state that the bearer of this note did what he had to do.’”

His mother looked in the mirror at D’Artagnan’s reflection a long time, then she turned to her maid. “That’s well enough, Marguerite, you may go. I’ll dress myself.”

Marguerite bowed and retreated, and D’Artagnan wondered if his mother was about to be frank.

But instead, his mother turned around in her chair, to face him. She waited till she heard the door to her room close, then turned to D’Artagnan. “What was it that someone did, Henri? What does all that ‘for the good of the state’ mean?”

“Maman,”
he said. “You’re not a fool. Don’t pretend to be one.”

She raised her eyebrows at him. “I am not being a fool. I simply don’t know of what you speak. Who has signed that letter, Henri?”

“The Cardinal.”

“Are you sure? It looked like it was signed with a single R. How could you tell from a single R that it was the Cardinal?”

“I understand from my friends that this is how he often signs letters of this nature,” D’Artagnan said, now curious about how much his mother knew, and how much she would let slip. “How could you read the R from that far?”

“Well, it was a single letter, and that was the only one it could be,” his mother said. “But son, where did you find it? And what could it possibly mean?”

“I found it amid my father’s effects,” he said. “In his tower study.”

His mother looked more agitated than ever. “In your father’s effects. Are you sure?”

“
Maman.
How could I not be sure? I found it in that trunk on which he always rested his feet.”

“But…how did you…”

“Get into his study?” D’Artagnan asked, and smiled slightly. “I have my ways.” He got up and stepped closer to his mother. “
Maman,
you know I’d never believe you guilty of any crime, but you must understand you’re not making it easy for me to believe in your innocence. You knew about this note, did you not? Did you always know about it, or did you find it after his death?”

“My innocence?” She looked at him, her eyes round and blank like the eyes of a statue. Put a mantel on her and she would pass for an image of a virgin saint. “What do you mean my innocence? What crime are you speaking of? Even if your father worked for the Cardinal, surely that would not be a crime. He is one of the most powerful men in France and he—”

D’Artagnan shook his head. “No, not working for the Cardinal, though you must know there are many French noblemen and people close to the corridors of power who would consider it a crime. But we’re not about to argue that. No. It’s just that…what you say about my father’s duel makes me wonder…”

His mother looked at him, agitated, a small pulse working at her white throat. “Makes you wonder if I walked up to him and ran him through the throat with a dueling sword?”

D’Artagnan shook his head again, as much to free it of the image his mother had evoked as to deny her accusation. “No. But I wonder if it was quite above board, or if my father might have been murdered. If he was working for the Cardinal, he was enmeshed into politics where—trust me, mother—men often die.”

His mother shrugged. “The worst that could be said about your father’s death was that it might not have been a fair duel. And that only because the two witnesses were both talking to Monsieur de Bilh moments before.”

“Both seconds were for the other man?” D’Artagnan asked, shocked. This was a complete violation of the laws of duels. He was about to say that was enough to make it murder, when he remembered his very first duel in Paris, the one that had turned into a fight between musketeers and guards of the Cardinal.

For that duel, he had challenged Athos, Porthos and Aramis, who were all seconds for each other, and he had brought no second of his own. He hadn’t known anyone in Paris. And though his father had known enough people in Gascony, if he had suddenly turned on Monsieur de Bilh for no reason any of his neighbors could understand, it was possible he couldn’t find a second, either.

His mother shrugged. “They weren’t seconds. I don’t think it was planned, or else, if it was, Monsieur de Bilh had forgotten all about it. Which would explain why your father was so furious.”

“My father was furious?”

“Indeed. Or at least that’s what your cousin Edmond said.”

“My cousin?” D’Artagnan asked in shock. “What had my cousin to do with it all?”

“Well, he was one of the witnesses. The other one was our priest. Both of them said that your father appeared suddenly and that he was obviously drunk.”

“How did they know he was drunk?” D’Artagnan asked, frowning. The idea of his father drunk was as unlikely as the idea of his father losing a duel. Oh, the older man drank. Everyone in this region drank, and when it was your own wine and your own brandy, made from your own grapes, it was very hard not to drink, at least to sample it. But his father could drink most men under the table, and D’Artagnan, in his seventeen years under his parents’ roof, had never seen his father lose control of his mouth or his movement.