Death in Gascony (21 page)

“M
AMAN
,”
D’Artagnan said, coming upon his mother in one of the upstairs hallways. She was sitting on one of the stone window seats that protruded from the wall on either side of the broad window—allowing someone to sit with a view of the outside or plenty of light.

Light was the material consideration in this case. His mother was working at white fabric, embroidering it in light colors. She looked up from her work and for a moment, for just a moment, D’Artagnan would have sworn she was on the verge of tears.

But she blinked, and smiled dazzlingly at him. “Ah, son,” she said. “Come sit.” And pointed on the other seat beside the broad window.

D’Artagnan sat. The window was glazed in tiny panes set in a lead frame. Through the uneven, thick glass he could see the fields outside, and villages, all of it looking like it was underwater.

“You left very early,” his mother said. “Before I was up.”

“I went to Mass,” he said, impatiently.

“Ah, that must be a new habit from Paris,” she said. “Going to the early Mass and on a weekday yet.”

He didn’t rise to the bait. True, he’d never been afflicted with an excess of piety and was rarely known to make an effort to attend more than the Sunday Mass—and that one often midmorning at the larger church.

But this was not the time to allow his mother to tease him about the lazy habits he’d left behind when he’d left the house. And it was not the time to allow her to indulge in motherly reminiscences of his stubbornness either. Instead, D’Artagnan spoke quickly, before he could lose his courage, “
Maman
, did you grow up in Paris?”

She startled, then laughed a little—a laughter that seemed out of place in someone who was pale from crying; wearing all black; and in whose eyes, tears shone, still. “Yes, Henri, I did. Remember I used to tell you stories when you were very little?”

“No, you told me stories of the convent,” he said.

“That too,” she said. “But surely I told you stories of the capital, as well, and of what it was like to grow up in a big city.”

He shook his head impatiently. “No. Not that I remember. I don’t remember your mentioning your mother or father, ever.”

“Oh.” She shook her head. “No, I wouldn’t have mentioned them. You see…I never knew either of them.”

“How not? Not know your own parents?”

“My mother died at my birth and my father…And my father shortly after, Henri. So, you see, there was not much to know. I grew up with some distant cousins, who brought me up as if I were their own.”

“And are they still alive?” he asked.

Marie D’Artagnan shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s been a long time, and, you know, the parents died there too, and I haven’t kept up my acquaintance with their children.”

“Acquaintance? They raised you!”

She laughed a little again, as though his outrage amused her. “Well, it is not that simple, you know. They raised me, it is true, when I was very little. But at six, I was sent to the convent as a boarder.”

“So you could learn your letters?” D’Artagnan asked.

“That,” she said, in tones of great patience. “And I think they hoped I would have a religious vocation, since I didn’t have any other relatives or…” She shrugged. “They always said it was what my father wished me to do.”

“But your father was dead,” D’Artagnan said. And remembered de Bilh saying her parents had only died just before her wedding.

She frowned a little. “Well, yes, but they said it was his last wish, and who was I to deny his last wish? But you know, I never professed. A lot of the other girls professed at twelve or so, but I never did. I felt it wasn’t quite right and that I’d prefer marrying and having children.” She smiled at him. “Which, as you see, is what I’ve done.”

“But you speak Gascon!”

“Oh, yes. My parents were from Gascony. As were my distant cousins. And so, you see, I speak Gascon, though I had to become familiar with it again after I married your father.”

“And how did you marry my father?”

“I met him and fell in love with him and he offered for my hand,” Marie D’Artagnan said. She looked confused. “And then we married.”

“No, but how did you come to meet him, if you were in a convent, I presume in Paris?”

“Oh…some…some friends of his had mentioned me and he came to meet me.”

D’Artagnan chewed the corner of his lip. There were already enough contradictions between his mother’s stories and Monsieur de Bilh’s. And she didn’t seem to remember that de Bilh had arranged the marriage.

And yet, it was all capable of a very simple explanation. Perhaps de Bilh had forgotten that she lived with guardians and not parents. Or perhaps because she was in the convent then, and he was talking to guardians, he wasn’t sure exactly of the relationship between them. And it was possible his mother truly didn’t remember how she’d come to meet her future husband. Perhaps the dazzle of meeting Charles D’Artagnan had driven every other thought from her mind. Perhaps. He’d been that much bigger than life, a man who attracted attention wherever he went.

Or perhaps she’d been Monsieur de Bilh’s sweetheart before settling for Monsieur D’Artagnan. Perhaps that had been her big romance. And perhaps it had been through his agency—intentional or not—that they met. In which case it made perfect sense for her to refuse to tell the story to her son. It would also account for the sudden flame of blush putting roses in her otherwise mortally pale cheeks.

And yet…

“What was your cousins’ name?” D’Artagnan asked.

She started to open her mouth, then closed it. “It was so long ago,” she said softly. “What can it all matter, Henri?”

“It can matter enough,” D’Artagnan said. “There might be an inheritance on that side, something the Cardinal wants?”

Madame D’Artagnan smiled, a rueful smile. “There is no inheritance, Henri. These are fairy tales.”

“If you don’t tell me their name, why should I believe you?”

“I can’t tell you their name. It is not my secret.”

“Secret what? That they harbored an orphan?”

“No,” she said, her voice strangled. “No. You don’t know. I can’t tell you. It is not my secret.”

“Well, madam,” D’Artagnan said, standing up and disciplining himself to speak coldly, as though this were not his mother and as if her eyes were not trembling and full of tears. “Then you may congratulate yourself on keeping your secrets, even if your secrets caused your husband’s death and may very well cause mine.”

“My husband’s death? They never did. And yours?”

“I’ve now been attacked three times since my father died,” D’Artagnan said.

And now her confusion became alarm. Madame D’Artagnan rose, putting her embroidery down on the seat. She rose and she put her hands on D’Artagnan’s shoulders. “You must go, son. You must leave. I tried to tell you before, but it is not safe for you in Gascony. You must leave. Now. This moment. Don’t wait. Take your friends and go, back to Paris.”

“Why should I go back to Paris, madam? Why don’t you tell me that?”

“I can’t tell you,” she said.

“Yes, I see,” he said, struggling to keep his hot temper in check and managing to sound—or at least he hoped so—controlled and indifferent. Truth be told, he was copying Athos’s manners. “It is someone else’s secret and you can’t reveal it?”

“Yes. Oh yes.” She pressed her hands into his shoulders, slightly. “But you must go. You must go as soon as can be.” And turning from him, she took a step away. “I’ll tell Marguerite to pack dinner for the four of you and your servants, and I—”

“Don’t bother,” D’Artagnan said. “I’m not going.”

“But you must go. As long as you’re in Gascony you’ll be in danger.”

“Well, in Paris I will be in danger too,” he said. “I was attacked first not a day out of Paris.”

“You were?” she asked. Then shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. If you leave Gascony, no one will have a reason to kill you.”

“Why would they have a reason while I am in Gascony? Tell me mother.”

But she only shook her head and cried.

“
Maman!
Are you…Is Monsieur de Bilh your lover?”

She looked up, so startled that the tears stopped. Something very much like a gurgle of laughter escaped her lips. “Monsieur de Bilh? Oh, no, that is monstrous.”

“Is it?” he asked. “Why? He calls you Marie. He says he knew you from childhood. He says he arranged your marriage with Father. What do you have to say to that?” He stepped forward towards her as he spoke. “Why don’t you tell me what’s happening? Must you keep me in the dark till I die?”

But she only looked at him, and it was as though her eyes suddenly focused. She nodded to him. “No, of course,” she said. “Listen, son, believe I had an affair with no one and that this secret, in which you place so much anxiety, is nothing shameful and nothing pertaining to me. Not truly, at least. If it did have to do with me alone, I’d have told you and be done with it.”

“But…But then why do you think I need to leave Gascony lest someone kill me?”

“I think they’re confused,” she said, as if talking to herself. “Yes, I think it’s all confusion.” And then, with a sudden, dazzling smile. “Don’t worry son. I shall arrange everything.”

Looking into her beautiful blue eyes, remembering the tenderness with which she’d gazed at her late husband; remembering her devotion to himself, D’Artagnan could not imagine her as a murderess. And yet, what else could he think?

“Mother, you must explain!” he said. It was almost a wail.

But all she did was shake her head and say, “It would still be safer if you left. But if you insist on not leaving, then I must just take care of correcting the misunderstanding. I must think how.” And with those words, she picked up her embroidery and ran down the hallway and into her room.

D’Artagnan, left alone in the hallway, wondered what she meant, exactly, and in what kind of trouble she was still going to get him.

Guilty or not, it was clear to him his mother knew something. And it was equally clear nothing short of a miracle would convince her to tell him.

“W
OMEN
are impossible,” D’Artagnan announced, coming upon his friends in the great salon of the house, where the good Bayard had served them sausage and bread and wine.

Athos only smiled at this statement. It had been his opinion for a long time now that most men would live happier, or at least more tranquil, lives if only they could stay away from feminine wiles.

Looking up at his young friend, whose lips were tightly set in a line, and whose feet moved with the rigidity of someone carefully controlling his legs lest he start kicking things in sheer fury, he waited till Bayard had left the room.

“Your
maman
didn’t tell you what you wanted to know, did she?” he asked, when the servant had closed the door behind himself.

D’Artagnan approached the table. “No. She says it’s not her secret, but someone else’s, and she cannot betray this someone else’s secret. She also told me I should go back to Paris because I would be safe there.”

Athos thought of Madame D’Artagnan imploring him to take her son back to Paris. He didn’t want to share that with D’Artagnan. Instead, he asked, “What did you tell her?”

“That I’d been attacked a day out of Paris and that therefore I hardly thought of the capital as a safe place.” He helped himself to the sausage and bread and ate with the appetite of one who was not yet fully grown.

“And yet,” he said, between bites of sausage. “I don’t believe she meant it, you know, as…I mean…I don’t think she’s guilty or knows anything about my father’s death or…or the people that attacked me. You see…I remember her with my father. She and he were always…Oh.” He shrugged, and stuffed a piece of bread into his mouth and chewed it as though it had personally done him harm. “You see…It wasn’t like they were in love, you know, like…like young people are in love, but they…they had a great friendship, an underlying understanding and…and their eyes grew soft as they looked at each other.”

Athos didn’t feel equal to telling his young friend that women could be great actresses. Oh, he’d told him that any number of times, and in many circumstances—but it was too much to expect that he could tell him that about his own mother and not suffer any resentment.

“It’s just…” D’Artagnan said, as he took a drink of wine and fell upon the bread again as a wolf upon a deer, midwinter. “It’s just that I know she knows something she doesn’t think important. And she says…she says she will take care of it, so no one will attack me anymore.”

“Well,” Aramis said. “You must understand that all women are like children. This is why the church hands them to the stronger hand of men to—”

“I would like to hear you say that to Athenais,” Porthos said with a chuckle.

“Porthos, you can’t deny that men fell through women. Men fell through the sin of Eve, who…”

And Athos, who had also fallen perhaps through the sin of a woman, but definitely through his own sin also, could not sit there and listen to Aramis’s sermonizing Porthos. Instead, he got up and walked towards the fireplace, with no great thought in mind beyond getting away for a while. But there, by the side of the fireplace, hung the portrait of a man in full military uniform of two generations ago. He was tall and blond and blue-eyed and, save for the hair color, looked, in fact, like no one so much as Porthos. Oh, it was not the type of resemblance that denoted a blood relation. Rather, it was just belonging to the same type of man. Tall, blond, bluff. He’d probably—Athos smiled a little—had duchesses and princesses hidden under the homely guises of accountants’ wives and maids. And he’d probably enjoyed his food and drink as much as Porthos did.

Porthos and Aramis were well away in a big, rambling argument. Athos heard steps behind him, and then D’Artagnan’s voice saying, “Oh. I’d forgotten about that. They must have moved it from upstairs. I wonder why.”

“The portrait?” Athos asked. “Whose is it?”

“Oh, my father’s. He had it done when he lived in Paris, you know. When he must have been about Aramis’s age or thereabouts.”

“Your father?” Athos asked, turning around in astonishment, to look at his short, dark, lean friend.

D’Artagnan smiled. “I don’t look a thing like him, I know. Or like my mother, either, I suppose. I must take after someone on her side of the family. Perhaps my maternal grandfather. You know…until now I never had any curiosity about her people? But now…”

“When it might be a matter of life and death.”

“Yes. I apologize for being so angry when I came in, but it was so frustrating not being able to make her understand that…That no matter what value she put on the secret she’s keeping, I would, perforce know more…or at least know if it related to me.”

He told Athos of his frustrating conversation with his mother, who corroborated de Bilh’s words—or at least close enough to it—and yet with enough discrepancies to be a problem. “But,” he said, “I couldn’t even get her to tell me the name of the cousins who raised her. What can she think is such a great secret about their family name?”

“Perhaps it is Richelieu,” Athos said, with a small smile.

D’Artagnan smiled too, taking the joke as it was intended, then shook his head. “I can’t understand any of it.”

“Attend, D’Artagnan. Perhaps she doesn’t know their name anymore?”

“Why? How would she forget it, if they raised her?”

“No, listen—if they sent her to live in a convent at six, as you said, she might very well not remember their surnames. She would remember perhaps the names she called them by—and it might never have been more than aunt and uncle and cousins.”

“But surely…” D’Artagnan said, at a loss. “There would be letters and…and…”

Athos shook his head. Sometimes he forgot how young the boy was. And sometimes he was forcibly reminded. “People who raise an orphan, even one of their own blood, often consider providing for her welfare charity enough and feel no need to keep contact.”

“But…why wouldn’t she tell me that, then?”

“Perhaps trying to spare you?” he said.

D’Artagnan shook his head, not as though denying it, but more as though expressing confusion. “But if she is…if
maman
is determined to protect me, how am I to find out…I mean, let’s suppose the danger does come from her family with or without the Cardinal’s intervention—how am I to find out who they are? And how am I to protect myself?”

“We’ll need to talk to the priest,” Athos said.

“He wouldn’t tell me anything before,” Aramis said, and Athos realized that Aramis and Porthos too had been listening to the conversation.

“No,” he said. “But then, Aramis, it is not your secret nor does it involve you in any way.”

“It is possible he doesn’t know any more than what he told me,” he said.

“And what did he tell you, Aramis?” D’Artagnan asked, his voice pleasant and his dark eyes showing a sparring sort of intensity.

Aramis looked up, his green eyes meeting his friend’s for a moment, then looked away. “I went back, as you know…and I asked…well…I wasn’t asking about your mother, but she came into the conversation, and he said that your mother came from Paris.”

“Paris,” D’Artagnan said. “It all accords then.”

Aramis inclined his head. “Except that…” He blushed. “He seemed to think there was something irregular about the marriage.”

“Irregular?” D’Artagnan asked. “What in the devil can you mean by that? My parents were married. His first wife was dead. I can’t—”

Aramis shook his head, but seemed unable to speak.

Seeing D’Artagnan’s hand stray to his sword, Athos said, “D’Artagnan, our friend got the impression that your mother was already with child…with you, when the marriage took place.”

For a moment, D’Artagnan’s hand continued hovering near his sword hilt, while he looked up at Athos with a truculent expression. But then at last he said, “Oh.”

“We are all human,” Aramis said, piously.

D’Artagnan nodded to the sentiment, without turning. “It doesn’t sound like an arranged marriage to me,” he said. “But then…perhaps…Monsieur de Bilh only meant that he’d introduced them and thereby arranged their marriage.”

“Perhaps,” Athos said. But something about all of it bothered him. Something gnawed at the back of his mind, as though he should know it—as though there was some important fact he already knew but was neglecting. He couldn’t put his finger on it. It receded before his thought like a rainbow before those who chase it. He shook his head. “At any rate, I thought the priest might know something of her family name—or her relatives before marriage…since she thinks it important not to tell you other’s secrets.”

“How would he know, if she came from Paris?” Porthos asked.

“You know, the bans will have to have been read here, as well as in Paris,” Aramis said.

“Very well,” D’Artagnan said, with sudden decision. We’ll go see Father Urtou. Perhaps he will consent to tell me what he wouldn’t tell either of you.”

“There is a good chance,” Athos said. “At least if we tell him the…circumstances. And that your father was probably murdered and you stand in danger.”

“Very well,” D’Artagnan said.

As his friends left the room, Athos lingered behind. He took one more look at the portrait of D’Artagnan’s father.

Something about it bothered him, and he couldn’t quite put his finger on what. It wasn’t that Charles D’Artagnan was a completely different type from Henri D’Artagnan. Lots of fathers did not look like their sons and vice versa. Even the fact that D’Artagnan didn’t at all look like his mother made no difference.

Athos knew—would have needed no more than the perusal of his own family’s portrait gallery to inform him—how often children looked like an ancestor four or five generations back. And yet, something was not quite right. Perhaps he remembered Monsieur D’Artagnan from somewhere?

He frowned at the big bluff blond in the portrait, with his carefully trimmed blond beard, his luxurious hair, his blue eyes that seemed to dance with sheer joy of living.

He could not pinpoint anything specificly wrong with the portrait. It would come to him, doubtless. And it probably would strike him in the middle of the night, when he would sit up in bed, gasping at the sudden realization.

And it probably would have nothing to do with Monsieur D’Artagnan’s murder or with the attacks on young D’Artagnan.