“Oh, good, that means you’re just a fool and not a half-wit,” Raoul said. He seemed greatly pleased with the idea that Athos had suspected him at any time. “And what did you mean to do if I had been guilty? Have me turned in and killed?” He shook his head. “No. I can’t believe that of you. So it would have been the old, ‘fly, all is discovered.’ ”
It took quite a while and much laughing before Raoul would let the subject rest. Then he extracted from Athos a full account of all that had happened and why Athos felt it necessary to investigate the crime. He sympathized with Aramis, though he couldn’t fathom the mind of a man who would fall for his late wife.
By the time the two friends retired—without ever finishing their chess game—Athos was as sure as a human can be of anything that Raoul hadn’t killed his wayward Duchess.
D’Artagnan hadn’t awakened and Athos picked up the book the young man had let fall—
Systems of Irrigation and the Building of Ditches with Diagrams
. No wonder the youth had fallen asleep—before waking him and sending him to bed.
“I shall leave tomorrow,” Athos told Raoul.
“Yes,” Raoul said. They stood at the foot of the stairs, which Athos would have to climb to his room. Raoul’s bedroom was in quite a different part of the house. “I understand why you must. Till your friend is proven innocent, you must investigate. But after he’s proven innocent, come and see me again, Alexandre. I want you to stand godfather to my son.”
The Best Intentions of a Novice; Dark Eyes and Dark Thoughts; A Message from the Cardinal
“
I
dreamed of her again, last night,” Aramis said. He sat in his room, on a chair and had, unconsciously, adopted a pose that had been common to him in early adolescence— his body slumped down on the seat and his arms hanging over the arms of the chair.
The black suits his mom left out for him were linen mixed in with wool and itched like the fires of hell.
Which the man standing at the foot of the bed, in the black habit of the Dominican was about to remind Aramis of, if Aramis was any judge of the expression in his eyes.
“I despair of you, Chevalier,” the Dominican presently said. He looked over at Aramis with an expression of the deepest despair and betrayal. “Indeed, I do. You are so gifted, in your preaching and your thought, so capable, so clearly . . . called to the life of the church and to convert others to the wonders of the faith—and yet . . .” The Dominican opened his hands, as if to signify that he couldn’t possibly help Aramis if Aramis didn’t reform his ways. “Don’t you understand,” he asked, leaning close. “Don’t you understand that the woman is dead? She’s even now suffering the pains of hell that her sin with you earned her. And yet you . . .” The monk looked like he would presently make a very uncharitable comment about Aramis, and Aramis looked away before the poor brother disgraced himself by stomping his feet or growling or something equally undignified.
He looked towards the window of his room, which was open to the still afternoon air, warm and suffocating with a foretaste of summer in its stultifying heat.
Oh, he’d entered this of his own volition. Or at least, he supposed it had been his own volition, though when his mother was around, when she was concerned in anything at all, it became hard for Aramis to tell which was his decision and which his mother’s gentle manipulation. Though she was his mother, Aramis wasn’t blind to the reality that he’d got his guile and his ability to manipulate others from her. Nor that the master remained superior to her pupil.
After she’d taken him to the cemetery and the gallery; after he’d seen where the enmity of the Cardinal had got his father, Aramis could only think to avoid the like fate. And avoiding the like fate—his mother had assured him— meant taking the habit as soon as possible.
But now Aramis had started thinking that it made no sense. After all, being a musketeer had helped him avoid his father’s early death so far. Aramis had simply learned to use the sword better than anyone who wished to kill him.
And the more he thought about it, the less he could believe that the Cardinal would have killed Violette because he meant to entrap Aramis. She was too close to the Queen, too high of rank, too connected in the court for the Cardinal to kill her as a mere pawn to his purposes. No.
Violette had been killed for other reasons. And Aramis was here, hiding, while he left his friends to figure out the crime. He chewed, thoughtfully, on his lower lip. The idea that his safety, his ability to return to Paris as a free man depended on the cunning of Porthos made him sigh. Porthos, after all, had many admirable qualities.
Porthos’s loyalty Aramis would vouch for; his strength could not be impeached, and even where his intelligence was concerned, Aramis didn’t think it was quite so dim as many in the musketeers would avow.
In fact, having known Porthos for these many years, Aramis was sure that Porthos was, if not brilliant, of more than average intelligence. Even if his was a peculiar form of intelligence that often had trouble translating itself to words. But Porthos’s cunning—well, Porthos’s cunning could only be considered at the same level as Porthos’ sense of fashion, which often made Aramis cringe and caused sensible people to shield their eyes.
Then there was Athos. Athos was, of course, very intelligent. Or at least, he’d read a lot of books. And been given as good an education as an old, well-grounded noble family could afford. Ask Athos about philosophy, about the virtues of the ancients, about that corruption which had caused the fall of the mighty Roman Empire and you’d get well reasoned explanations, concise and set into words so carefully picked that even a school master could take no exception to them.
Athos, when he was thus inclined—often after he’d drunk far more than anyone should drink—would debate even theology with Aramis himself, and could make his points over Aramis’s even on those things in which Aramis was well schooled. But Athos’s practical intelligence, his knowledge of people and people’s motives . . . well . . .
Like most misanthropes, Athos tended to assume the worst of humankind. While this was better than assuming the best, it was just as fallible. Athos saw every man as a mirror of himself and himself as composed of the worst qualities he’d not even observed but read about. Aramis was not so dense that he hadn’t gathered that in Athos’s past there was something he viewed as a crime and for which he blamed himself. He would bet—from knowing Athos—that it was something no other human being would feel guilty about. Or at least, no other sane human being. Athos’s long silences, his brooding, his imbibing, his reckless and always unlucky gambling all seemed to bespeak a great love with ruin and death.
How could Aramis trust Athos to save Aramis from ruin and death, when those seemed to be the older man’s true lovers?
Then there was D’Artagnan. D’Artagnan was cunning. Aramis would give him that. In fact, when he’d first met D’Artagnan, Aramis thought he might very well have met his match and watched the young man in careful, if horrified, attention, to make sure that D’Artagnan did not mean to maneuver behind Aramis’s back.
He’d come to be satisfied of the young man’s loyalty and probity. None of which meant he didn’t think that D’Artagnan wasn’t cunning.
But part of what made D’Artagnan’s cunning not so threatening was the fact that the young man was young yet. Just seventeen and newly arrived in Paris, D’Artagnan wouldn’t be able to penetrate the secret places of the court, nor to ask questions of those who knew Violette best. And even if he did, their motives might be opaque to him, who had never been a courtier.
Oh, with the four of them together it was true that the whole often seemed far more than the sum of its parts, and yet . . .
Aramis became aware that he had been quiet for a long while. And his quietness was echoed in the thunderous frown on the Dominican’s face.
“You were thinking of her again,” the man said. He was middle-aged. Though, to be honest, he was probably no older than Athos’s thirty-five years of age. But he was greyer, what remained of his hair around the monacal tonsure, an iron grey and faded. And his face too had a curious faded look, the skin seeming almost colorless and wrinkled, around mouth and eyes, as if he’d frowned disconsolately once too many.
“Tell me at least,” he said, with a beseeching tone. “That you were thinking of her in sorrow. That you were sorry for the torments she must be suffering for those delights you shared with her.”
“I wasn’t thinking of—” Aramis said.
The Dominican smirked. “No, I imagine you weren’t. You were thinking of her luscious thighs, her soft breasts. This is what you dream about, is it not?”
“Her breasts were not so much soft as firm,” Aramis said, and then realized what he had said, as the Dominican stared at him in horror.
“I cannot save you, Chevalier. I cannot save you,” he said. “You are headed for the fiery pit headlong, and I can’t save you. As much as I respect your honorable mother, as much as I would like to help her convert her son, I don’t think I can do it.” He opened his arms in a show of helplessness and, instead of resuming his ranting as Aramis hoped, he opened the door and headed out, slamming it behind himself.
Aramis took a couple of breaths, contemplating the closed door. Truth be told, he was growing bored with the sermons and tired of the narrow view of a man who had entered a monastery as a child and clearly knew nothing about the world he railed against.
On the other hand, the Dominican was his mother’s spiritual counselor and had great influence over Madame D’Herblay. If Aramis’s mother heard about how he had offended the priest . . .
In Aramis’s mind a horrible panorama arose. Things that had happened when he was very young and had, somehow—most often without knowing how—aroused his mother’s ire.
There would be pilgrimages. There would be attendance at the sermons of nearby preachers whose words were reputed to hold some great sin-fighting virtue. There would be shrines. And relics.
The horror of it made him spring to his feet, and race out the door at a most undignified pace, slamming the door behind himself in turn.
In the corridor, outside his room, he saw the Dominican some steps away. Walking with the necessary tactful pace of a holy man, he’d gone a much smaller distance than Aramis had just covered in a rush.
“Stop,” Aramis said, running to catch up. “Stop, you must forgive me if I love the world. Did not God so love the world that He gave the world His only son?”
The Dominican turned around and looked at Aramis with the expression that would make perfect sense if Aramis had been something smelly and repulsive found at the bottom of the monk’s sandal. “The Lord does not love the world,” he said, and, turning, started to descend the stairs, his dignified pace only slightly pressed by Aramis’s hurry to catch up with him.
“But listen, it’s in the Bible, that God so loved the world He sent it His only son,” Aramis protested.
“God did not love the world,” the Dominican insisted, hurrying down. “He sent our Lord Jesus Christ to redeem those in the world who were willing to be children of God. He sent Him to pull us above the world, to take us out of the world.”
“Uh . . .” Aramis said, and sped up his pace of descending the stairs to keep up with the Dominican whose sandals were now slapping the steps with a rapid fire force. “Uh, but . . . But . . . Even Augustin said that—”
He couldn’t find his breath, much less his mind to complete the thought, and they’d reached the last flight of stairs before the lowest landing—the entrance hall to the house.
Aramis stopped talking because his mother was in the hall, and looking over her shoulder at him and the Dominican with an expression of mingled incredulity and horror.
“
Maman
,” Aramis said, but it came out as a squeak.
The Dominican started more coherently, “Madame, I believe you might be deluded as to your son’s vocation, because—”
Madame D’Herblay waved them both into silence, and Aramis realized that there were sounds coming from the wide open front door. Sounds of people walking, sounds of talking, and a dulcet female voice as though the angels themselves were singing in his ears.
Through the door, in order, came several servants, carrying trunks, an old priest who looked like a much older and blander version of the Dominican and a couple of older women. All of them were dressed in the Spanish manner, the women in vast skirts and high-necked gowns, the men in dark clothes with much embroidery. They all looked grim as Spaniards, too, their features set in that harsh disapproval of the world and everyone in it that was bound to make the Dominican brother happy.
But at the end of the crowd, a woman entered. She was slim, dark haired, her black hair, with just the slightest hint of curl confined by a coif at the front, but falling free in the back, past her waist and, it looked like, past her buttocks. She would be able to sit on it . . . Though she wore Spanish-fashion clothes, which meant the neckline was high and the bodice constructed so that her chest appeared flat, there was something to her graceful walk and the narrow confines of her waist that told Aramis she probably hid a beautiful figure.
He imagined her naked, cloaked only in her luminous dark hair and he was sure an “oh” escaped his lips. At least the Dominican brother gave him a most venomous look.