Death in Gascony (11 page)

His mother only nodded. “They all three say he was very drunk. He came stumbling over the wall of the threshing floor, and he walked right up to where de Bilh was standing, and he drew his sword and called de Bilh a damnable coward and proceeded to attack him.”

“My father? He attacked de Bilh like that?” Even in the men’s worst breaks of friendship, they’d never gone beyond exchanging curt words. “Why?”

His mother shook her head and shrugged. “Who knows? None of us does. De Bilh didn’t even seem to know. And, oh, Henri, he was so sorry about your father’s death. I understand it happened in the rush of combat, but he was as shocked as I was, if not more. The poor man looked one step from the tomb, himself. ‘He wouldn’t stop attacking me, Marie,’ he said. ‘He kept attacking me, and I was only trying to parry, but instead, I struck him. I never meant it.’”

“He called you Marie?” D’Artagnan asked, shocked. While de Bilh had been in and out of the house ever since D’Artagnan remembered, it was not done for men to call women to whom they were neither related nor married by their baptismal name.

His mother colored, then shrugged. “No, I don’t think he did. I misspoke.” She got up. “I’m sorry, son. I’m still confused and shocked, and I should never have made you come back and get involved in this. You see, I’m just a foolish woman.”

Looking him in the eyes, steadily unblinking, she said, “I need to dress, if I don’t want to be late for supper with your friends. I will speak to you later and answer any questions you might have. But now you must leave and let me dress.”

D’Artagnan left the room, his mind whirling. He very much doubted that his mother could or would answer any questions he might have.

His entire life, he’d seen his mother as a sweet innocent, relying on his father to keep her safe and steady. Had he been wrong all along?

S
OMETIMES
Porthos despised his own mind. It wasn’t just that it would not work like the minds of his friends and those men who were generally accounted very smart at court. That was it too, of course. He could understand neither Latin nor Greek, and some of the conversations between Athos and Aramis made his head hurt.

But it was not his mind’s insufficiency of words that galled him. No. The worst of how his mind worked was the things it got hold of and wouldn’t let go.

All through that dismal dinner, with all of them very quiet—and D’Artagnan looking at his mother now and then, as though she had personally betrayed him—Porthos had thought of the blood drops.

He didn’t know what D’Artagnan’s shock and indignation was all about. If he had to hazard a guess, he would suspect it was because his mother had dressed well and arranged her hair for supper with three nearly strange men so shortly after her husband had died.

Why this should upset D’Artagnan, Porthos could not imagine. After all, it was an honor his mother did them in dressing up for them as though they were important guests, above her in social station. And besides, however grieved she must be, D’Artagnan couldn’t possibly imagine that a woman like her, as beautiful as she was, would spend the rest of her life in mourning her husband without finding another.

He couldn’t understand it, and so he’d isolated himself from all the conversation around him and instead concentrated only on those drops of blood. It could be as Aramis had said. In fact, Aramis was a wise man and far more intelligent than Porthos, so it probably was as Aramis said. It could be that those small drops of blood had been shed by Monsieur D’Artagnan’s opponent as he returned home.

But it seemed to Porthos that until they knew if the man had even been wounded in the fight, or whether he lived in the direction those drops had gone, he couldn’t be sure. And then…and then there was something else, something about the path of those drops that bothered him.

If he was remembering correctly—and he thought he was, because his memory rarely played him tricks—then those drops didn’t mill around on the threshing ground, and finally head that way. No. They were straight that way and to the place where D’Artagnan’s father had been run through.

Surely if his opponent had run him through and immediately taken off running in the other direction, this would be known and would have been talked about?

Even in Paris, where the edicts against dueling were enforced—as Porthos knew they weren’t in the provinces, or not yet—one did not kill an opponent in a duel and then run immediately away, without so much as checking to make sure the other man was dead. At the very least, Porthos would expect the drops to loop from the duel area to the place where D’Artagnan’s father had fallen, and then go the other way and over the wall.

But instead there was nothing—nothing but that straight retreat or advance the other way.

It didn’t seem right. And because it didn’t seem right, Porthos’s mind wouldn’t let it be. He could tell himself it didn’t matter. He could tell himself he was a fool for thinking on it nonstop. And yet, his foolish mind would not let go of it, and it would keep on worrying at it like a starving dog at a juicy bone.

In bed, he woke up in the night, again and again, thinking he’d seen the logical explanation of those blood drops in a dream, but just could not remember it. He stared at his ceiling and tried to understand it, and he could not.

At last, as dawn tinged the horizon a light pink, he’d got up, put on his clothes, and left the house as silently as he could and got his horse from the stable, to retrace his way to the threshing floor.

The bastide was very quiet early dawn, but by the time he’d left it behind and found himself amid the fields, the sun was up in the cloudless sky and the day was a warm one for November. Birds sang hesitantly in the nearby trees.

The pale, unblinking light illuminated the threshing floor unforgivingly. The blood stains were more visible than ever. There was the pool of blood that had doubtless come from the duelist’s thrust into D’Artagnan’s father’s throat, and from his withdrawing his sword.

The still-pumping heart of Monsieur D’Artagnan père would have propelled blood out, along with the sword’s withdrawal. And it would have jetted out like so, making exactly the pattern of blood on the smooth stones that Porthos saw just there.

And then he would stagger back, once, twice, his own feet leaving bloodstained footmarks on the stones. Back, and back, as his heart struggled to keep pumping, despite the severing of one of the body’s arteries. Back and back, till his heart lost its battle—or at least his consciousness did—and he collapsed on the floor, there, where the rest of his blood had drained away until he was dead.

That explained the bigger stain there, indicative of a bigger puddle accumulated over a longer time.

There was no other blood, no indication of his adversary having received a wound—except the trail of very small drops going the other way along the threshing floor to the edge of the wall.

Again Porthos retraced his steps to that wall, saw the blood that crossed it and, leaning over the wall, saw the same blood drops in the hard packed dirt and stunted shrubs around the threshing floor.

Aramis said it was the adversary retreating, but when had the adversary gotten wounded, then?

If Monsieur D’Artagnan had wounded the other man in the fight, it had to have been before the man’s final thrust, right? Or at least, it was most likely to be like that. However, it wouldn’t be the first time that Porthos had seen a man come back at his slayer after being run through.

There was this duel he’d fought, back when he was young and foolish, where, after running the other man through, Porthos had assumed he had won the fray and turned his back on the enemy who was staggering and had, in fact, gone down on one knee.

Porthos had turned his back to ask the second if he would require satisfaction. If it hadn’t been for the look of shock in the second’s eye, as he looked over Porthos’s shoulder, Porthos would never have turned. And he would never have jumped out of the way of the sword his mortally wounded adversary had lifted and was bringing down to cleave Porthos’s head.

So, he wasn’t such a fool as to assume it was impossible for a mortally wounded man to inflict injury. No. But the thing was, there was the puddle of the wounding, and there, clearly marked by back-stepping footprints of the dying man in his own blood, ten steps away, the puddle of the dying. Nowhere was there the faltering step forward, the attempt at attack.

So it was more than sure—almost absolutely sure—that Monsieur D’Artagnan had not rallied from his fatal injury for long enough to wound his foe. It being so, that meant that any injury from which the other man could have bled must, perforce, have been inflicted before Monsieur D’Artagnan had been run through.

But, in that case, there would be more drops of blood, as the adversary jumped around and parried and thrust—all activities likely to cause the blood to loosen from a recent wound. There would be increasing blood, as the fighting made the man bleed more.

None of this was there.

And in the unlikely event the man had been wounded, say, by Monsieur D’Artagnan’s sword as he collapsed…or that the man had nicked himself on his own sword in retrieving it, surely there would be drops of blood as he approached the falling man to determine if he was alive or dead.

Regardless of the reason for the duel, even in case of mortal offense, the winner of a contest would verify that his adversary had died—or else if he was alive and needed assistance.

A gentleman, and Porthos had heard no rumblings that the slayer of Monsieur D’Artagnan was not one, would never abandon a wounded opponent without seeking help for him. If the hatred between them were such that it demanded more satisfaction, then the man would arrange for them to meet again and to settle anything that hadn’t, so far, been settled between them. He would not, however, leave an enemy to bleed to death alone and without even the benefit of the sacraments.

That was done in war but not in a duel.

For a moment he wondered if that was what Aramis was pursuing as well; whether that was why he was so obsessed about the religion of the combatants. But Porthos had heard enough to surmise that Protestants too sought the blessing of the clergy before they died. And besides, chances were that Aramis was thinking of religion because he was Aramis. He was like that. He even read the lives of saints to likely females.

Dismissing Aramis with a shrug of his massive shoulders, Porthos frowned at the drops of blood. It made no sense at all, but the only way he could think of for the trail of drops to add up to something was if Monsieur D’Artagnan had been wounded before and had arrived, bleeding, from that direction where the drops started on the wall. He’d jumped down from the wall—and there was a spatter of drops there, as though the movement had increased the bleeding—and challenged and attacked his adversary, suddenly.

There were drops leading to the smaller puddle of blood. If the duel had been brief and intense, with Monsieur D’Artagnan attacking and the other man defending and neither of them moving much, any spatters of blood from Monsieur D’Artagnan would be lost in that bigger spurt when the sword that had sliced into his throat was pulled out.

And then there was the pouring of blood at his dying.

It wasn’t perfect, as far as explanations went. Though Porthos couldn’t find any facts that didn’t fit in it, it didn’t satisfy him completely. He didn’t like to come up with explanations like that, one on the other and not know for sure.

However, the only way to know for sure was to interview the witnesses of the duel. He would do that too, later. At least if his friends didn’t. He had no idea what Athos and D’Artagnan might be doing. He’d been so absorbed in thinking about the bloodstains that he didn’t even remember if they’d discussed it at dinner.

But until he could interview those who’d been there, Porthos would assume that Monsieur D’Artagnan had arrived wounded and that events had taken place as he thought now.

Which meant, of course, that Monsieur D’Artagnan had been wounded elsewhere.

Porthos bounded to the low wall, and, following the drops of blood, over the wall and down on the other side. There was a sort of path there. Not a real one and probably not an official path of any kind. Just the sort of path beaten by boys running between fields, or by women carrying water. It was not a straight path—they rarely were—but wound around taller scrub, and it turned aside from stones too big to jump onto or from heels too steep to climb.

But the drops of blood followed its meandering, clear and black against the yellowish beaten dirt.

Porthos followed it, like a hound on the scent of a hare. Leaving his horse behind, tied near the threshing floor, he followed the small footpath, this way and that, up and down small hillocks.

It ended in a field and there—Porthos stopped—at the edge of the field, the scrub brush had been trampled and stomped and the field—left bare by harvest, save for a stubble of grass that looked much like the stubble on the face of an unshaven man—had been stepped on and kicked.

It looked, Porthos thought, as though a great fight had taken place here. A fight too intense and strong for him to be able to tell whether there were two men or six, or ten.

That there had been a fight, Porthos would swear to. He’d seen plenty of fields after duels. And this was a field where a duel had happened.

He looked around himself and it was all fields and, in the distance, a straggle of protruding trees, like the tongue of the forest extending onto the fields. No houses. No place where some urchin might have lingered and seen something. Nothing.

There was nothing for it. No obvious witness.

But, on his way back to his horse, Porthos reasoned that just because there was no obvious witness it didn’t mean there were no witnesses.

The place was wide open and not hidden. If he remembered rightly, the duel had taken place in the light of day, and there was no reason that someone might not have seen the fight that preceded it.

Porthos had grown up in a rural area much like this—fields and woods and the occasional peasant house. He knew well enough how hard it was to hide anything at all without someone, somewhere, seeing it, commenting on it, and—if one were unlucky enough—carrying news of it to one’s father.

So he would simply have to look further and spend more time at it. He would have to talk to the peasants hereabouts, in and out of the bastide.

He remembered the sight of the area they’d had from the higher ground. He remembered that in addition to the bastide there was a straggle of peasant houses, here and there.

In those houses, somewhere, there might very well be someone who’d seen people fighting in this field. They’d be able to tell Porthos whether the wounded man was Monsieur D’Artagnan père, and whether he’d been wounded fairly or by stealth. Somewhere in those houses, there might very well be someone who knew who had sounded whom, and whether the men were the same who’d fought a duel later on, at the threshing floor.

Porthos would be able to find the reason for those blood drops. And then he could stop thinking about them.