Death in Gascony (16 page)

“M
ONSIEUR
,
you really should not be working like this,” the farmer said, while Porthos, pitchfork in hand, helped load a cart high with hay.

“Why not?” Porthos asked with a smile. “What else are these muscles good for, I ask you, but to make the work light for others?”

The farmer looked up at him, squinting. He was a short man and though powerfully built nowhere near as powerfully built as Porthos. He spoke with a noticeable lilt and sometimes corrected himself after slipping into a whole sentence in Gascon. “It is not right,” he said. “For quality to work in the fields.”

Porthos let out with a peal of laughter. He’d been up since dawn and in the course of the day—still before noon—had helped a shepherd boy find a missing goat; had carried a load of wood for an old lady; had collected eggs from a henhouse; had helped a farmer chop a fallen tree. At each of these occasions, people had given him confused looks, but none had boldly stated their problem as this man had.

“I’m from Normandy,” he said. “My friend Athos says that my ancestors came over as invaders, in longships. I’m not sure how he knows that, but I’m not going to ask. A great one for learning, Athos is, and he’ll talk your ear off for hours at a time, about history or theology or what have you. And—I tell you—it gets really confused when he starts explaining all about the Philistines and the Sardinian. But the thing is, you see, my people were hardly better than just wealthy farmers with a lot of land. Oh, my father said we were. Descended from kings and all that.” He shrugged and threw another pitchfork of hay onto the cart. “Never set much store by it myself. When I was little, I used to play with the other children nearby, which means I often helped them at their chores. My favorite friend was the miller’s son.”

The farmer shook his head. “Still doesn’t seem right. You are a lord, and one of the King’s Musketeers.”

“Yes, and I can fork hay.”

Since the man could not deny this, he stopped protesting, and allowed Porthos to go on working. After a long time, when he judged the moment right, Porthos sprang the question, “By the by,” he said. “I’m here with my friend D’Artagnan.”

“Oh, yes,” the man said. “Monsieur Henri, who went to Paris. Very sad about his father.”

“Yes. Particularly that he should go to that duel already injured.”

“He went injured?” the farmer asked, and his pitchfork stopped, in turn. “To the duel?”

“Oh, you didn’t know that?” Porthos asked, managing to look surprised, as if such a fact had to be common knowledge.

The man shook his head. “Not as such. I mean, we’ve heard that he was drunk or something, and that this was why he challenged Monsieur de Bilh to a duel, but I never thought…Injured you say?”

“Oh, yes. Judging by the blood track on the threshing floor and beyond, someone wounded him, there, near that great big oak, at the end of the field, where the path starts that leads to the threshing floor.”

“What? By old Jacques’ field?”

“Right there, yes. Someone wounded him, and he bled all the way to the duel.”

“But…who would do such a thing?” the farmer asked. “Did he perhaps have another duel before that one?”

“That I don’t know,” Porthos said. “I was wondering if anyone was likely to have seen it, its taking place there, in the middle of the fields.”

The farmer looked at him so long, and with such a lengthy, absorbed look that Porthos wondered if he’d forgotten the question. But at long last, he shrugged. Pointing behind him, at a small hill, atop which there was a stone house, he said, “My sister might have.”

“Your sister?”

“She lives in that farmhouse at the top of the hill. It’s an old house, and it has…attics.” He spoke as though attics were the latest innovation in building or perhaps something of such class and standing that he barely dared mention it in conjunction with his own family. “And I swear she does nothing all day but go up and down those stairs and look out those windows. Her mother-in-law lives in the attic, like, and she’s an invalid, so my sister spends a lot of time there, looking after her. Unless I’m mistaken, from the attic she would have a view of Jacques’ field, and she might very well have seen something.” He paused. “I confess I’m now curious about who else old Monsieur D’Artagnan could have had a fight with.”

“He wasn’t a man for fighting then?” Porthos asked.

The man cackled. “Ah, that he was. A great one for fighting. But he was not such a devil as to fight two duels in a day. Most of his fighting, i’ truth, were no more than talk. He would call someone a villain or a dog’s pizzle, but it all meant nothing, you know? It was just words. Like he and that Monsieur de Bilh, they did argue once a week, regular, but then you’d see them in the tavern of a night buying wine for each other.”

He shook his head, suddenly sad. “I never thought it would end in a duel and blood. Never, monsieur. Not in a hundred years.”

Porthos agreed with him about the sadness and lack of sense of it, and helped him finish loading his wagon, after which the man walked him up a pathway to the house he’d pointed to.

“It is better,” he said, confidentially, “if I introduce you. My sister Louise, she gets strange ideas, and this way she will know that you know me, and that everything is safe.”

In fact, when the door was presently opened by a remarkably pretty woman in a white apron, the farmer said briskly, “Louise, this is Monsieur Porthos, and he is a big lord, with lands and everything, so mind your manners. But he helped me load my hay wagon, and he is as good a fellow as you’ll ever meet, so I’d be obliged if you’d oblige him in whatever he wants to know.”

Louise curtseyed enthusiastically, causing her loose curls to fall against her pink cheek, and she lowered her eyes modestly. “Monsieur,” she said. “Anything you want to know. You do me a great honor, monsieur. If you’d come in and have some wine and cheese, monsieur.”

Porthos felt a fleeting attraction and thought that she would probably be as much fun as his own beloved Athenais, who was, after all, an accountant’s wife. But then he thought that Athenais, who was in her midthirties, would resent his admiring this woman. Oh, she wouldn’t be angry with him. Or perhaps she would. She was a woman of very little patience and she’d once put Aramis in a green dress—which Porthos was sure was the result of Aramis looking at her disparagingly. But whether she was angry with him or not, she would be hurt. And since Porthos found all women beautiful but only one woman worthy of his love, he disciplined his thoughts away from the rosy-cheeked Louise.

She led them both into her kitchen—warmed by a large fire and smelling of stew and fresh bread. There she gave them each a mug of wine and a large slice of cheese with fresh bread to go with it. “We make our own cheese,” she said. “And our own bread. And our own wine too.”

As they started eating, she sat across from them at the well-scrubbed table. “Very well, monsieur,” she said. “What did you need to know that I can tell you?”

“It is about that old Monsieur D’Artagnan,” the farmer said, before Porthos could open his mouth.

“What, the one that died?”

“That one,” her brother said. “Monsieur here says that he was wounded by the time he got to the duel with Monsieur de Bilh.”

“He was? Poor man. No wonder he was taken mortal.”

“Yes. At least monsieur here says he was, and I see no reason to doubt him. He says there was blood, right there at the edge of old Jacques’ field, and he wonders…well…he doesn’t know who done it, and he doesn’t know if it was a duel, you see?”

She frowned intently, as though trying to follow her brother’s reasoning, and Porthos felt less regret at having to stop thinking of her, for Athenais’s sake. His Athenais never needed things explained twice. Oftentimes she didn’t need them explained once, as her very acute intellect penetrated what had not been said and discovered what no one had told her. But then, this one did make good cheese, he admitted as he took another bite and savored the sharp flavor.

“When was that?” she said, at last. “That he was killed?”

“Why…” Her brother thought, as he counted upon his fingers. “It wasn’t last week, or the week before. I think the funeral was on the day after Pierre’s goat ran into the Cazou’s farmyard, remember, and their dog set upon it. I remember because that wasn’t half a to-do and it came on the day after the duel. So it was…Monday three weeks ago. I remember because I’d seen Monsieur D’Artagnan at Mass just the day before, and he seemed so happy and cheerful, and little did he know that he would lie there in a coffin in the next week.”

She nodded, as if all this made perfect sense, and frowned a little.

“You wouldn’t happen to have seen whoever it was that he fought with at the edge of Jacques’ field on that day, would you?”

She made a face. “Well, then, I did, but I wouldn’t call it fighting. Not as such. Because, you see, he put a knife into him.”

“Monsieur D’Artagnan put a knife into someone?” the farmer asked, slamming his empty mug of wine down.

“No, no. The other man put a knife into Monsieur D’Artagnan. At the time, I thought he touched him with a stick or something, because, you know, I was looking from my attic. But now I’m not so sure. Not if it was in that same day, and if he bled from there to the threshing floor. It had to be a knife. But the funny thing…”

“There was something funny?”

“Yes. The funny thing is that Monsieur D’Artagnan didn’t fall. And he didn’t fight back. He just staggered a little, then he turned around, and it was as if he had nothing against the man, you know, which is why I thought he’d only touched him with a stick or something. But he staggered a little, and then he continued, towards that threshing floor.” She crossed herself. “Where he met his death, poor man.”

H
AVING
eaten at home and answered half a dozen questions from Bayard, who wanted to know what fodder to buy for the horses, and had a dozen other questions that baffled the mind, D’Artagnan found himself in a very bad mood.

The more time he spent at home the more he became convinced that, much as he loved Gascony, he wasn’t ready to settle into the life of a provincial lord and do what his father had done for years. Now, more than a week away from Paris, he ached for it with an almost physical longing. He wanted to walk the crowded streets. He wanted to return to his lodging, in the Rue des Fossoyers, climb the stairs and find everything as it was when he’d left. He wanted to stand guard at Monsieur des Essarts—and at the Palais Royale with his friends.

He wanted to go drinking with Athos; he wanted to go riding with Porthos; he wanted to attend Mass with Aramis. Though he’d done the last just this morning, it wasn’t right. Even his friends weren’t right in Gascony. They’d been going one each way, and D’Artagnan saw less of them now than he did when they all fulfilled guard duty.

So it was in a very bad mood that he set off on his horse, across the countryside to Monsieur de Bilh’s house.

There was no way to cross where their lands met. For one, they met only at a place where they shared a boundary for the space of maybe twenty steps—which was why his father’s insistence that they had a disputed boundary had been taken as a joke by all, including Monsieur de Bilh and, presumably, by D’Artagnan’s father, himself.

So, instead, D’Artagnan took himself toward de Bilh’s house by road, which involved taking a long circle around both houses and the woods between them.

It was in crossing those woods that D’Artagnan found his way—a narrow path amid the tall, thickly planted trees—barred by a man on horseback. The man wore a cloak, pulled up and over his face, and D’Artagnan had no idea who it might be, but his first thought, as he drew his sword, was that he was out of patience for this.

“Remove from the road, monsieur,” he yelled. “Or I shall remove you.”

The man threw his hood back to glare at him, and D’Artagnan recognized the dark brown hair and the sharp features of his cousin Edmond. “Is that all you have to say, Henri? That you will remove me?”

D’Artagnan sighed and returned his sword to its scabbard, as his horse moved restlessly beneath him. There was still a chance Edmond would move quickly and kill him before he could draw. But—having known Edmond his whole life—D’Artagnan knew there was about as much chance of that as of Edmond’s suddenly growing wings and flying.

“What do you want, Edmond?” he said. “And I must tell you right now that whatever Irene told you is the greatest of falsehoods.”

Edmond scowled. As the younger son of a very wealthy family, he was excellent at scowling, and he practiced the skill several times a day. “She told me you were looking for me.”

“Oh, well, that wasn’t a falsehood, then. But I’d have come to meet you, by the by, without the need for you to block my way, by the road.”

“Stop, Henri. I don’t know what you wish of me, but I’m not willing to do it.”

“Pray?” D’Artagnan said, confused.

“Go and tell your master that if he doesn’t wish me to marry Jeanne de Laduch, he’ll have to make it worth my while not to marry her. As a second son, it’s either marrying the de Laduch heiress or entering orders—and some of us take our orders more seriously than he does.”

“What?” D’Artagnan would have liked to ask something more to the point, but all he could extract from the confusion of his mind was that one word.

“Go tell your master, Richelieu, that I will not give up my engagement, no matter how much he wishes the de Laduch fortune for one of his tame protégés; he’ll have to come and fight me for it.”

D’Artagnan felt his hand fly to the pommel of his sword at the accusation of his working for the Cardinal. It was only by an effort of will that he kept his voice relatively calm as he said, “What makes you think I work for the Cardinal?”

“Why! Why else would you be coming around to my house and questioning Irene about my whereabouts? Your father worked for the Cardinal, and clearly you do too.”

“Is that what Irene told you?” D’Artagnan shouted, and laughed. “That I questioned her about your whereabouts?”

Edmond looked confused. This wasn’t exactly hard, in general, but it normally took longer to achieve. He looked at D’Artagnan, his blue eyes, just like his sister’s, filled with utter confusion. “You didn’t ask Irene where I was?”

“No. It means nothing to me where you were. I just wanted to speak to you about the duel that killed my father.”

“Oh,” Edmond said, sounding so much like Irene that it was all D’Artagnan could do not to laugh. “You don’t care, then, that I went to Bordeaux?”

“No, should I care that you went to Bordeaux?”

Edmond frowned at him, then dismounted, slowly. “Dismount,” he said, looking up at D’Artagnan. “We can speak better on foot with the certainty that no one hears us.”

Given that the man couldn’t use a sword any more than he could fly, Edmond was not stupid. At least, he had been brilliant at his letters and his catechism, which had, initially, given his parents the idea of sending him into the church, until the possibility of a marriage with Jeanne de Laduch had presented itself.

He was two years older than D’Artagnan and a palm taller, a well-built man and accounted the toast of society wherever he graced with his presence. He now looked at D’Artagnan and said, “Shall we begin again? Why did you wish to see me?”

“I wanted an account of my father’s last duel,” D’Artagnan said.

Edmond shrugged. “There isn’t much to tell. He was…drunk, I think. Or perhaps feverish. I was talking to the priest, and Monsieur de Bilh was waiting to talk to him.”

“Had you met on purpose, or…”

Edmond shook his head. “No. By accident. We all happened to be crossing the field at the same time, and we ran into each other, and I remembered there was something I must speak to the priest about, and so I was, while Monsieur de Bilh waited his turn.

“All of a sudden, your father emerged from the path, huffing and puffing as though he’d been chased by the devil himself. I said ‘
Hola
Uncle, what’s here?’ And the others didn’t speak at all. Sometimes I wonder if he was drunk, and if—had I stayed quiet—he might not have passed us by, without even noticing we were there. But, alas, I spoke up, and he turned.”

Edmond paused and shivered in so noticeable a way that D’Artagnan could see it out of the corner of his eye. “He looked at us, but it was really odd. As though he couldn’t see us, but something else. Like…like he was following a panorama of his own mind, if that makes any sense.”

D’Artagnan nodded. Once or twice, he’d seen men like that. The drunk, the mad, the terminally wounded all had a look that stared beyond the present at the unimaginable future.

“So, he looked at us,” Edmond said. “And then he focused on de Bilh, though I’d swear on the holy book that he wasn’t seeing him. He stumbled across the distance between them, though, pulling his sword out of its sheath and saying…in this odd tone, not quite a whisper, ‘Ah, you villain. I will teach you to attack a man by stealth.’

“De Bilh was so shocked you know? Speechless. At first he looked to smile, as though he thought your father was joking—and very well he might have been, since just the night before the two of them were talking together in the tavern. And then your father came at him, sword in hand…”

“Yes,” D’Artagnan said, more to encourage him to continue than in agreement.

“You know what your father was,” Edmond said.

“Yes.”

“He came at de Bilh with his sword raised. It was all the poor devil could do to draw his own sword. And he was parrying, and saying ‘Stop, Charles, you don’t know what you’re about.’”

“Did my father talk, also?”

Edmond shook his head. “No, not at all. Just huffing and puffing and giving these weird little grunts, almost whimpers, but with it all, still coming at him, in a dead heat. It took no time at all for the fight to get really close at hand, with them standing practically together, and de Bilh was still trying to defend himself, just using his sword to parry your father’s thrusts. And he’d raised his sword thus”—he lifted his arm beside his own neck as if to demonstrate.

“And then your father said, ‘You’re my undoing but I’ll be yours.’ And charged towards the sword. It went into his neck, where the great vein runs, and there was blood everywhere.” He swallowed. “And that was that. De Bilh was horrified and pulled the sword out as fast as he could, and called for me or the priest to send for a surgeon. But one look at that injury and I knew a surgeon couldn’t do anything. The blood was pouring out of your father like water out of the fountain in the main plaza.

“Your father took ten steps back, and then he collapsed, and then he died. And that was it.” He gave D’Artagnan an appraising glance. “So if you were intending to do something supremely foolish, like challenge de Bilh for a duel, stay your hand.”

“Why does everyone think I want to challenge people for duels on the flimsiest of excuses?” D’Artagnan asked.

Edmond merely looked at him a long time.

D’Artagnan sighed. “And about what you said earlier? You say my father was working for Richelieu?”

“I don’t wish to discuss it,” Edmond said.

“Well, and I regret the necessity to ask you to do so,” D’Artagnan said. “But it is necessary, nonetheless.”

“Why is it necessary?” Edmond asked. “I have told you what my involvement in your father’s death was, and exactly what happened. If you can find some way in which the guilt of this can be laid at my door…”

D’Artagnan thought of telling him about the ambushes on the way to Gascony. Or perhaps of telling him about the letter from the Cardinal in his father’s trunk. But he could not. For one, it was possible that Edmond had something to do with one or both of those events. He thought of the dagger with the de Bigorre shield now in his luggage.

“It is not a matter of laying anything at your door. Only my mother told me in her letter that my father was working for the Cardinal. In Paris, I’ve thrown my lot in with the musketeers who, whatever you have heard in the provinces…,” D’Artagnan said realizing how insufferably smug he sounded, but not knowing what else to do. “Whatever you’ve heard, the musketeers do not support the Cardinal. Rather they’re for the King, in spite of and beyond his eminence’s machinations.”

“So it was a shock to find your father worked for the Cardinal?”

“Not…a shock as such,” D’Artagnan said. “But a sharp reminder that when I left home my father told me to respect Cardinal and King alike. Advice I don’t think I know how to keep, as my preference for his Majesty’s camp is very decided. But…enfin, I’d like to know what my father was doing for his eminence.”

“I don’t know what else he was doing,” Edmond said heavily. “But as it pertained to me, he told me they knew of my gambling debts, and that his eminence had purchased some of them. And if I should not break my engagement to Jeanne de Laduch and allow a protégé of the Cardinal to win her hand, I’d be made to pay those debts, with money I do not have.”

“I see,” D’Artagnan said.

“No. I don’t believe you do. This is why I went to Bordeaux, trying to gamble what I have in exchange for what I don’t.” He frowned. “I broke even, but I did not win.”

“But…what was the Cardinal’s interest in your marriage?”

“None but to allow someone he favors to take Jeanne’s hand and her fortune.”

“Are you in love with Jeanne, then?”

“In love…” Edmond made a sound. “D’Artagnan, she is ten years older than I and cross-eyed. But if I don’t marry her, I’ll have to go into the church, and I don’t think I’m suited to being a priest.”

“I see…” He took a deep breath, seeking to gain courage. His cousin had motive—more than motive enough—to rid himself of D’Artagnan’s father. While his cousin had not said it, D’Artagnan could well imagine what kind of pressure his father would bring to bear on behalf of the Cardinal.
Give in, or we’ll tell your father about your debts,
was part of it, as was
Give in or we’ll tell Jeanne’s family.
Instead, D’Artagnan said, “You said you don’t know what else he was doing. What makes you think he was doing anything else at the Cardinal’s behest?

“Well…” Edmond looked at him a while. “I don’t know what, and I’m not sure why, but I am sure that your father was meaning to ensnare de Comminges.”

“Ensnare…?”

“Well, there was much muttering about how now de Comminges would finally pay for the evil he’d done. And about how your father had them under eye and they could not escape.”

Oh, Father, how could you be so foolish?
D’Artagnan thought.

“I tell you, it worried me most of all when old de Comminges died. Only a week before your father, but at the time I wondered if your father had done it. Sometimes, I still wonder.”