“Perhaps,” Porthos said, chewing on the corner of his moustache, as he did when he was agitated or puzzled. “Perhaps there is a secret door that opens into the wardrobe itself.”
The maid frowned. “I don’t think so,” she said.
“Please, Mademoiselle,” he said. “Aramis is a dear friend and I cannot renounce all hope for his innocence without verifying.”
The girl went very serious, and nodded. “That I understand,” she said. “It’s no use, but follow me then. I wish the blond musketeer no harm myself. I’ve often told the other maids he’s the best looking man who’s ever come into this palace. My Mousqueton excepted, of course.”
Thus speaking, she led him down several corridors, softly lit by candles on holders upon the wall, till they came to a small hallway, whose wall was filled wholly by a large mirror set in an ornate golden frame.
Hermengarde pushed this and pulled that within the frame, pressing a rosette and twirling an ornamental nail till the whole glass creaked and moved inward, opening.
It revealed a narrow little space, dark and smelling of sawdust and disuse.
“You go first,” she told him. “Otherwise you’ll not get near enough the wall to push any part of it and make sure there is or isn’t a door. You won’t, for that matter, be able to look through the eye openings. Why, often my friends and I, when we come here, have to cram past each other to get a look, and we’re much smaller than you.”
Porthos wondered if they often came to watch Aramis and his lady at their sport, but it wasn’t the sort of thing he could ask with impunity of a near stranger, even of a near stranger who appeared to be very well known of Mousqueton.
Instead, he walked briskly down the twisting tunnel, which ended in what looked like a little window ornamented by little shutters. The maid had got a candle along the way and was now holding it aloft. “You may open the screen,” she said. “There’s no one in that room so there’s no risk they’ll see even a spark of light from my candle. The Cardinal himself has taken a great interest in that room, and after the door they forced down was repaired, he had had it locked and kept under watch with the musketeer’s uniform still in it, so that he can bring witnesses to see the musketeer’s guilt.”
“He’s so sure he’s guilty,” Porthos said, and sighed. The maid didn’t answer.
Porthos opened the little shutter and looked through. The room was dark, the only light coming through the door to the balcony, the same door that Aramis had used to escape.
By that meager light, Porthos could see that the room was full of furniture, and that the massive oak bed appeared to have been stripped of all its coverings. But Aramis’s uniform was still where the musketeer had left it, flung across one of the arm chairs.
Porthos backed away a little and turned his attention to the wall around the little shuttered window.
It was smooth plaster, and he couldn’t see any part that might be hinged or even any part that was different from the rest. But then again, in this palace, smooth walls often weren’t and mirrors and portraits could swing unexpectedly to reveal passages and byways.
He felt the wall all over, methodically, from top to bottom, his massive but sensitive hands feeling for any irregularity, any soft spot, anything that might trigger a hidden spring.
“See, I told you there was no way.”
“No,” Porthos said. And since the little shuttered space covered by the portrait was no more than a handsbreadth wide and a hand span tall, Porthos couldn’t imagine any human so small as to be able to crawl through it.
He sighed, as Hermengarde led him out of the narrow corridor and back in the hall. As she opened the mirror and looked out, she said, “Mousqueton!”
Porthos looked over his shoulder to see his servant standing in the hall. It was at least a quarter of an hour early. Porthos would like to imagine Mousqueton’s eagerness was due to the servant’s wish to see Hermengarde. But he knew it couldn’t be true. Because if he’d rushed to see his lady love, Mousqueton would have changed from his not-so-impressive day clothes—a much worn old suit of Porthos’s. No, Mousqueton was disheveled, and hatless and looked red in the face as if he’d run the whole way.
Hermengarde must have sensed that something was wrong too, because she stepped aside, allowing Porthos to pass. “Mousqueton,” Porthos said. “What is wrong?”
Mousqueton reached up, as if to remove the hat he wasn’t wearing. Finding nothing, his hand dropped disconsolately. “It’s the Cardinal, Monsieur.”
“Oh, not that,” Porthos said. “I said Monsieur de Treville or even the King. No one is going to believe the Cardinal wants to see me.”
“But . . . Monsieur,” Mousqueton said. “He does.”
Where Families Are Proven to Share More than Coats of Arms; A Musketeer’s Capitulation
T
HE sun was setting and Aramis sat by the window of his room. He was all too aware that he should be at Vespers—having heard the bells of the private chapel on the grounds ring, then ring again as if his mother had ordered the bell ringer to remind Aramis of his duties.
But he sat by the window instead and reread, one by one the letters from the thick sheaf of letters that Violette had sent him. He’d kept them all, from the slightly formal ones at the beginning of their acquaintance, to the later ones, full of poems and stories of her daily life. He’d tied them together with a ribbon, and he kept them at his hand. Now, as he opened them, the faint fragrance of the paper reminded him of her.
The thing about Violette was that she was such a lousy writer. The beautifully shaped handwriting of the convent girl that Violette had once been was formed into words that were sometimes Spanish and sometimes French and sometimes some odd amalgam of the two which Aramis could only decipher thanks to his knowledge of Latin.
So many times he’d scolded her for her incapacity to write in one language only. But now he read her silly confusion through tears in his eyes and wished he could have her back—that he could spend one more night with her, receive one more letter from her. And he wouldn’t complain, not even if it was all in Spanish.
He put his hands on the stone parapet of his window, and rested his chin on them, looking out onto the fields gilded by the setting sun. They were empty now, the farmers having gone to their homes for dinner.
If he squinted in the direction of the nearby hamlet of Trois Mages, from which most of his domain’s peasants came, he could see faint traces of grey smoke climbing up against the blue sky. Suppers being cooked, he wagered.
And he wished—with all his heart and soul—that he and Violette could have been two of those peasants and able to marry and live together. He would leave every morning to work in the fields—his attempts at picturing this failed because though he’d lived in the country for most of his life, he’d never spent much time observing what farmers did all day. No matter. He was sure it was tiring and full of effort, but what did it matter? He’d come home every night to their hovel, to find his Violette and their children.
He pictured the children they would have had—blond as they were, with Violette’s expressive blue eyes. The girls would all be beauties and the boys all tall and strong, like their father.
He sighed, a sigh to burst his chest. Then he got up and turned around, clasping Violette’s letters, in their silk ribbon, to his chest. Sighing, he consigned them to a hiding place between a pile of books on his table.
He felt restless and small.
For years now, he’d been a musketeer, his own man, living in Paris as he pleased. And he’d had Violette.
But now Violette was gone and Aramis felt like he was a young man once more—helpless, bound to his formidable mother’s will.
It was as though his mother had preserved Aramis’s childhood, his youthful place in his home, just as she had preserved his father’s study.
And now his father’s study came to Aramis’s mind as an excellent place to hide in from his mother’s enforced devotions. His mother might keep it as a shrine, but he’d never seen her enter it.
It was locked, but as a musketeer in Paris—or even as a seminarian in his early years there—before Violette, Aramis had learned the fine art of picking locks and developed it into such a science that he could open almost any lock with a simple knife.
He found such a knife amid his youthful treasures, beneath a loose floorboard.
From there to running down the stairs to the entrance hall and his father’s locked room, was a moment.
Picking the lock took no time at all.
The study remained as he remembered from childhood—all was covered in dust save for a path from door to desk, crisscrossed by small, feminine footprints.
His mother’s, Aramis thought, as no one else had a key.
He followed the footprints to the chair behind a desk. The desk was a model that Aramis had often seen among courtiers in Paris. A series of little drawers and doors encircled a round writing surface, supported by spindly legs. A place for everything and, usually, one or two secret compartments in the bargain.
The desk was as dusty as everything else, but here and there, throughout, was the mark of Aramis’s mother’s hands as though she’d caressed it.
Suddenly the idea of hiding here was not so pleasing. He retraced his steps to the door.
Just in front of it there was an area where his mother’s footprints took a semicircular detour as if around an invisible obstacle.
Curious, Aramis scuffed the dust there, with a foot. The floor beneath was black.
Paint or rot?
The noise of a key turning in the lock made him look up to see the door open and the disapproving expression on his mother’s face.
For someone who’d once been beautiful and soft; for someone who couldn’t be much more than minor Spanish nobility, his mother managed to look remote as a goddess and disapproving as a queen.
“Maman,”
Aramis said. He felt red climb his cheeks. “I just thought . . .” He said and stopped. He couldn’t tell her he’d thought of hiding out from her.
“Rene,” she said, and her face became a mask of deep sorrow. “You know you could have asked me for the keys, if you wanted to see your father’s study. There was—” She looked jealously towards the desk. “No reason for you to violate this space.”
Not sure what to say, Aramis nodded.
Suddenly there wasn’t much place to hide in this room.
His mother sighed.
“You know your father and I married in the spring. In fact, next week is the anniversary of the day we married.” Madame D’Herblay’s eyes were full of distant longing, like a child who looks upon a dream. “It seems so long ago now. He died, you know, only two years after your birth. Sometimes I wonder what would have become of him, what kind of man he would be now, had he lived long enough.”
Aramis said nothing. His mother rarely spoke of his father. In childhood, Aramis had formed a theory that his mother was a nun who’d escaped from a convent and his father an itinerant ribbon seller. It all seemed very logical to him, considering that no one ever mentioned his father, that his mother seemed to live at her devotions, and that the most dashing strangers to ever come to the manor were ribbon sellers. It wasn’t till he was five or so that the whole had stopped seeming the most plausible explanation. And even then it had taken his nursemaid’s shock at his theory to show him that it couldn’t possibly be true.
He had to repress an urge to smile, thinking of the young peasant’s look at her charge’s telling her that he was the illegitimate son of an escaped nun. She’d wasted no time in setting him to rights. And then his mother had made him write, several times, the verses of the bible that pertained to marriage. Aramis lost all interest in smiling.
And realized his mother was staring attentively at him.
“You probably think it very odd that I’ve always wanted you to go into the church,” she said, looking at him.
This was strange indeed. Madame D’Herblay had never cared what her son thought odd or not. “No,
Maman
,” he said. “I know you discerned in me some vocation, some hope that I—”
She clucked her tongue on the top of her mouth and sighed. “I thought it was for the best, Rene, I really did. But I don’t know how to explain it to you.”
“You are my mother. What do you need to explain? I’m only—”
Madame D’Herblay moved away from the window, and walked past her son. “Come with me, Rene,” she said. “To the cemetery.”
“The cemetery?” Aramis asked, shaking. He had some strange idea that his mother meant to open one of the family tombs and make him jump within. But the idea was monstrous. His mother had never sought to kill him. Only to bury him, living, in a monastery.
Into Aramis’s mind the suspicion that his mother had hated his father and now sought to avenge herself upon his son crept and grew. But he couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t countenance it. How could a son have such thoughts about his mother? Oh, he was the worst of sinners.
He walked after her, all the more determinedly because he was so sure he was sinning against her in his mind.