He turned the object in his hand.
“Does it belong to Aramis?” D’Artagnan asked.
“I don’t know. I mean . . . I couldn’t swear to it, but I would doubt it.” Athos frowned down at the knife. “If it did, I think I would have seen it before. Each of us brought very few objects . . . very few comforts that are worth anything from our former lives. And those, the others have seen, at our homes, or on our person, or else, at campaign or in duel. I’ve never seen this.”
“Would you have remembered it?” D’Artagnan asked.
Athos permitted himself a smile. “My dear friend. While I may look ancient to you, I’m not quite at the age where I’ll lose my memory and go tottering into the dark of not remembering something like this.”
D’Artagnan blushed, his olive skin showing a dark red flush on his high-cheek-boned face. “I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I never thought you’d . . . At any rate you’re younger than my father, who would beat me black and blue if I told him he was getting too old to remember things.” He looked away, clearly embarrassed. “It’s just that . . . Could Aramis have won it at a game, or have been given it as a gift? Recently?”
“Only if it was the day of the murder,” Athos said. “Because if it were given to him as a gift, Aramis would have shown it to us. Or if he had won it at a game. Something like this, he wouldn’t have resisted showing off, particularly—” He stopped himself, afraid he was going to say something indelicate and sound as if he were making fun of his friend.
“Particularly?” D’Artagnan asked.
Athos sighed. There was nothing for it. “Look, I’m not saying that Aramis is envious or that . . .” He gave up explaining. “It’s just that as long as I’ve known them, Porthos and Aramis have envied the sword I brought with me from my domain.”
“The one you keep on your wall, beneath the portrait,” D’Artagnan said.
“The very same. It was my great great great grandfather’s sword, and every heir in my house has inherited it. Mind you, I no longer use it in duel or combat. It needs certain material repairs which, at this moment, I lack the money to achieve. And without them, there is too great a chance it will break on clashing it, ruining it and possibly costing me my life besides. But . . .”
“But?” D’Artagnan prompted.
The boy was relentless. Athos smiled, thinking that Raoul would doubtlessly tell him this was good, that D’Artagnan drew Athos out of his long, self-imposed silences. “But both Aramis and Porthos envy it. Porthos for the way it looks and Aramis, I think—though I wouldn’t want you to tell him I said so—because it is an inheritance come to me from my male ancestors, which signifies I’m the adult man in my family, the heir.”
“I have gathered,” D’Artagnan said. “Though not through anything he said, that Aramis too is the heir, and I think the only son.”
Athos sighed. “Yes, but . . . I . . . Aramis has a mother. At least I’ve heard references to his mother a few times.”
D’Artagnan nodded, as though he understood, though Athos very much doubted he did. Judging from D’Artagnan’s personality D’Artagnan was very much the only son and heir. And though he had once jokingly commented that all of his father’s domain would fit in the little cemetery des Innocents in Paris, yet however much he stood to inherit, his position as heir would never have been disputed.
And though Aramis never spoke of his home life—not to Athos—Athos had caught references over the years, mostly in what Porthos said. Porthos was Aramis’s oldest friend and, for all the two men’s differences, the one in whom Aramis confided unstintingly. Athos gathered that Porthos thought that Aramis would be much happier if he were an orphan. And for all his plainspoken, down-to-earth approach to life, Porthos could be a shrewd observer of such things.
“At any rate,” Athos hurried on. “And for whatever reason, he admires my sword. He wouldn’t resist showing me a piece such as this. It would, you know, in his mind, somehow, even the score. Show me that he too had a piece worthy of being coveted. And it would make Porthos green with envy.”
D’Artagnan didn’t dispute this. He had got in a duel with Porthos—that very first day in Paris—by showing that the inside of Porthos’s cloak was not quite so magnificent as the exterior. And that had been enough to excite Porthos’s murderous ire. Impossible, after that not to know that Porthos liked showing off and expensive things.
Athos turned the dagger again in his hand. It was well balanced, exquisitely so for something whose carving meant it had been intended for a bauble, more than for serious grappling. In fact, Athos thought, taking it in his hand, though he often liked fighting—at least in battle— with a sword in one hand and a dagger in the other, he couldn’t imagine grasping this dagger for very long. Though it was finely polished, after a while the crevices and curves of the two lovers would indent themselves upon the palm. He frowned at it.
“Is there any way of finding to whom it belongs?” D’Artagnan asked. “Or belonged?”
Athos shrugged. “Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps. Depends on how old it is, and through the blood it is impossible to tell how pale the ivory, and whether the slight tinge on it is aging or blood.” He looked at D’Artagnan and caught a look of total incomprehension and cursed himself for a snobbish fool who assumed that everyone had been raised in the same circumstances he’d been. “Ivory yellows as it ages. If this was carved much longer ago than my father’s time, then it will be visibly yellow.” He returned the dagger to its sheath with some care. “But if it was made in this generation, then someone will likely know who made it. There is a distinctive style to these pieces and usually only a few people in the world at any time can carve this finely. This was an expensive piece. If I take it down to the jewelers’ streets and ask around, someone will tell me where it came from, which will be a step to telling me who owned it last.”
He paused in his long speech and thought it over. “Of course, they might also have bought it and sold it recently, even if it is old. A lot of old families at court buy and sell their finest belongings as the occasion offers or the need arises. Sometimes I think the jewels of most noble families spend more time at the jewelers than in the family home.”
“Not an armorers?” D’Artagnan asked. “A jeweler?”
“I think so,” Athos said. “No serious armorer, nor anyone who intends this as a combat weapon would carve the handle in such a way. Judging from the theme of the carving, and the way it’s executed, I’d guess it to have been an engagement gift,” he said. “From some great lady to her betrothed.”
While speaking, they had reached Paris proper and were now in the thickly populated streets, bumping elbows with groups of jovial men out for a night of drinking, and with laughing couples on their way who knew from or to where.
Night had become darker, or at least, the light of the occasional lantern suspended over a tavern doorway seemed to be brighter than the light of the moon above.
“Jewelers’ street is just down here,” Athos said, taking his bearings, even as he covered the dagger with the end of his cloak, to obscure it from potential thieves. “Shall we go there now?”
“I can’t,” D’Artagnan said. “I’m due at Monsieur des Essarts’s, to stand guard from eight till midnight.”
Athos felt he’d been remiss. This last month, they’d all been standing guard in a group, either at the royal palace, at the Treville house or at Monsieur des Essarts. There had been much joking that by acquiring a young guard, Monsieur des Essarts had also availed himself of the three best swords in the musketeers corps.
“I’m sorry,” Athos said. “I had quite forgotten the schedule. This last week seems like a dream. Do you wish me to come and stand guard with you.”
D’Artagnan shook his head. “I feel it’s important we discover the murderer as soon as possible, particularly if . . . Particularly if it’s . . .” He cast a look around and didn’t pronounce the recognizable name.
Which was just as well since Athos often believed that the Cardinal had spies everywhere. Even, he thought, the ravens and the doves spied for his eminence. “If it’s someone important,” he said, before D’Artagnan should recover his courage and actually pronounce the name aloud.
D’Artagnan nodded.
“Yes,” Athos said. “I too feel it would be for the best if our friend’s name was cleared as soon as possible. And if whatever the plot is to get him out of Paris and out of circulation were foiled.”
D’Artagnan turned. “I wish you luck,” he said. He bowed slightly and parted company with Athos, who went his way into the jewelers’ street.
Footprints and Somersaults; Ghosts and Words; Monsieur Porthos’s Very Deep Doubts
P
ORTHOS parted with his friends just outside the palace. He had taken care not to leave by the kitchen area, and he’d left Mousqueton deep in conversation with Hermengarde.
He rather doubted he would see the scoundrel tonight, and that was as well. Because Porthos was thinking.
It still seemed to him that his friends were approaching this in a completely wrong way. How the two of them could still maintain that it was impossible for anyone to come in through the balcony when they’d seen someone come in through the balcony baffled Porthos. He classed it under the stupidity of very smart people, with a few other examples he’d seen from his friends such as Athos’s strange tendency to drink heavily and then gamble while drunk, as if wine made him more qualified to spot the marked card and the weighted dice.
He walked around the garden, fully absorbed in these thoughts, to stand under the balcony that gave onto the dead Duchess’s room. Well, truth be told, he could not— anymore than his friends could—see how anyone could get in through the balcony. He looked up and up and up, at the little stone parapet, then turned around to look at the nearby tree. The tips of the branches there still showed the signs of Aramis’s disastrous fall among them. But there were no fresh leaves on the ground. And no fresh leaves meant that no one had climbed up into—or out of—the tree recently.
Not that climbing up the window from the tree would be possible. At least, as Porthos measured the two or three body lengths of his body between the tree and the stone parapet, he couldn’t imagine anyone even leaping that distance.
But of course, they might have left that way. They might. Except that here were no leaves.
He then looked at the ground and set about tracing the path of the footprints that were about the same size as the ones he’d seen upstairs in the bedroom.
Easier said than done, as the foot size had looked average for a woman or a young man. About the size of Porthos’s extended palm, from tip to wrist. And a lot of women and young men lived in the palace or worked there, to judge from the maze of crisscrossing footprints upon the reddish dirt. To make it worse, there were areas of grass and areas in which the dirt was quite packed.
However, Porthos reasoned, to make the footprints that the intruder had made upon the bedroom floor, he or she (he was not yet convinced of Athos’s determination of gender—after all, how much did Athos look at women?) would have needed to step on very loose red dirt.
The only place Porthos could find dirt loose enough was upon the flowerbed in which the tree was planted.
Experimentally, he put his foot in it, then on a grassy area nearby and the traces of dirt looked the same. In fact, he if looked at the tree bark closely, he could see, here and there, bits of the same dirt.
Someone had climbed the tree. But that made no sense. If there were signs that the person had come down via the tree, as Aramis had, that would at least make a little bit of sense. But no. You’d leave red dirt on the bark going up, not coming down.
Porthos stepped away from the tree and looked from it to the balcony and back again. Impossible. Also, insane.
Oh, he would readily admit that the tree went as high as the balcony, but at the very top, it was a mere wisp, a thin trunk, like that of a yearling tree. And, yes, Porthos readily admitted that the masked person in the room had been smaller and lighter than him. Probably smaller and lighter than D’Artagnan, whom Porthos was fairly sure of being able to lift with one hand and without straining—despite the young man’s muscular build.
But let’s suppose the woman—or man, or the devil himself—was as light and lithe as a human could possibly be. Let’s suppose that he or she had climbed all the way up to the top of the tree, and, from the top of the tree, eyed the distant balcony.
Could he or she have made it there? Porthos would be cursed if he could figure out how, barring growing wings.
And on this, it seemed to him, the whole thing hinged. Who could have got into the room, not who had a motive to kill Violette, or even who had a motive to kill Violette while Aramis was in her room.
Achieving the heights of that room was such an impossible, miraculous task that Porthos could not imagine its being simply an incidental step in murdering someone. No. He was sure of it. Whoever knew a method to scale those heights was the person who’d killed Violette.
Something else bothered him about the phantom who’d pranced into the room. The mask. If you were nobody, and nobody in the palace knew you, why would you care if someone saw you there? Why would you mind if you were recognized?