Read The musketeer's apprentice Online
Authors: Sarah d' Almeida
The musketeer's apprentice (20 page)
“Oh . . . There are questions,” Aramis said. “Other questions than the simple fact of how the boy might have died. You see, while it is true what you say, and I’m sure I’ve seen the bush around Paris, there are people, perhaps, who wouldn’t be in a position to go out and lop off leaves from a bush to poison anyone. People who . . . it could be said . . . would want a more concentrated dose, and more lethal. People in a position of power who . . .”
The Benedictine’s eyebrows rose again. “You mean, in sum, his eminence Cardinal Richelieu, I suppose?”
Aramis shrugged. “Someone of prominence, whosoever they might be,” he said. “Someone who would not be in a position to run to the garden and cut leaves, or to bake a pie incorporating them. You see, if this child was as I suppose him to be, streetwise and capable, I don’t think he would easily be tempted by a dainty full of poisonous berries. Doubtless he would have tasted them or known them.”
The Benedictine spread his hands again, this time in a seeming show of helplessness. “I always think that you gentlemen in the King’s Musketeers are a little too obsessed with the Cardinal, as though if his eminence were to achieve all his goals France would be lost by it. And yet, I’d swear the man, though he enriches himself a bit, is not even as corrupt as most of our noblemen. He doesn’t seem to crave riches or women or . . .”
“It is power he craves,” Aramis said. “Just power. Surely you understand that.”
“But a craving for power doesn’t mean the power is necessarily wrong. It seems to me the Cardinal’s aims are as much for the good of France as anyone else’s at court. He might have different ideas as to what that good might be, but that is about it. Surely . . .”
Aramis shrugged. He transferred the jar to his left hand and examined the nails of his right hand, something he always did when immersed in thought. In anyone else making this speech, he would have suspected a fatal sympathy for the Cardinal, such as might mean Brother Laurence was already the churchman’s agent. But Brother Laurence wasn’t like that. He was one of those creatures who go through life thinking more than doing—and more involved in his studies than in any human affairs. If the Cardinal were an herb, then surely Brother Laurence’s opinion would be soundly and carefully reasoned. The Cardinal, and France and the court for that matter being either people or assemblies of them, the good brother’s opinion would be slightly less well thought out. “I’m not going to dispute with you,” he said. “Whether the Cardinal’s ideas for France are correct or whether the King’s or . . . other people’s are. I’m just going to say that surely you don’t doubt, in the pursuit of his objectives, the Cardinal would not spare the life of a child.”
“In the pursuit of his objectives,” Brother Laurence said. “The Cardinal would not spare the King himself nor the Queen, but truly . . . why would he kill a child?”
Aramis shrugged. “As a means of creating the appearance of a crime so heinous that even Monsieur de Treville would not defend one of his own musketeers?” Aramis said. “Besides, you must know if he manages to strike at one of us, myself or my three friends, the rest of us are bound to go into exile or otherwise disappear, for what credit and face would we have, when presented with such dishonor in our midst?”
The Benedictine’s eyes watched Aramis, attentively, then the man shrugged. “You might have good reason there. Or more than good reason. And yes, his eminence is quite capable of such behavior where it suits him, and I won’t dispute it might have suited him. I don’t live enough in the world to understand such impulses and such crimes.”
Aramis nodded. “There are other suspects . . . other people who might have done it. A nobleman, perhaps one who was the boy’s father or at least whom the boy thought was his father.” He shrugged. “People like that, at that level, unlike housewives or other plebeians, might find it hard to come by the berries and leaves, and might have had to disguise the poison in some other way.”
The brother nodded. “Well,” he said. “Nightshade is called belladonna, because its extract, when dripped in the eyes, makes the pupils huge, something that is accounted of great beauty by our court ladies. There are other preparations that use it. As a cream, it is said to make the skin smooth and even. You must understand I have no personal experience with it in that form, as my patients are rarely concerned with the appearance of their skins, and yet . . .” He shook his head. “There’s many ways it can manifest itself and many people who make extracts of it.”
“And if someone ate . . . either the berries or the concentrate of it? How long till death?”
Brother Laurence shook his head. “It might not lead to death at all,” he said. “You understand, it is possible to have it in such a small dosage that it causes only dreams and hallucinations. In adults, at least, most of those hallucinations seem to be of a . . . sexual nature.”
“Supposing a dosage large enough to kill?” Aramis asked. “In a boy about this height,” he held his hand at below his shoulder. “And weighing very little, though most of it muscle?”
The Brother sighed, then shook his head. “Half an hour? An hour? Not very long at any rate. With that little flesh, it is easy for the entire body to become poisoned very quickly.”
Aramis nodded. Porthos had just had the time to become alarmed at the boy not having shown up for his lesson. That meant an hour, maybe less. And the boy had died shortly after Porthos found him. “So it is not one of those poisons . . . It wouldn’t be possible for someone to have poisoned him over weeks, or months? Or perhaps to have given him the poison the night before?”
The friar shook his head. “Oh, no. It’s not a slow acting poison at all. If you take enough to poison you, you will die very quickly.” He turned his back on Aramis and started rummaging amid his clay jars on a shelf. “Someone would have had to poison the boy, at the most, a couple of hours before he died.”
“Well, that at least gives us something solid to ask—a person’s whereabouts just before the boy died.”
“Well . . . indeed. Except they could have given it to him in some flask of liquor or some baked something with instructions to consume it at a certain time.”
Aramis tilted his head. “It is devilishly hard,” he said. “I much prefer murders by stabbing or bludgeoning.” And, seeing Brother Laurence look over his shoulder at Aramis with a startled expression, Aramis added. “I mean, I much prefer trying to solve such murders, not that I prefer committing them that way, for as I hope you know I do not make it my business to kill people.”
“I should pray not,” Brother Laurence said. “Except for your duels, of course.”
“Those are hardly murder.”
“Indeed. I suppose not.” The little friar sighed. “My friend, surely it has occurred to you that having found such a relatively easy way to dispose of inconvenient people, the murderer is bound to murder again?”
Immersed in this gloomy thought, as he left the monastery, Aramis managed to walked all the way into the middle of a group of men, who were waiting a little distance from the door before he realized that they were all dressed in the blood-red uniforms of guards of the Cardinal.
“What can this mean?” he asked. “Were you gentlemen waiting for me?”
The leader, an ugly man with a scar, whose name, Aramis vaguely remembered as Remy, said, “Indeed, and if you just deliver the papers to us, we shall now be gone. We ransacked the house, you see, and couldn’t find it. So one of you must have it. And since there’s a woman involved, it must, perforce, be you.”
Aramis was as baffled by this speech as could be expected. The only thing he could understand from it was that these men wanted some papers. Porthos’s genealogy, he thought. Now that it had failed to incriminate the musketeer, its very existence pointed to the Cardinal. They wanted to eliminate proof.
Mentally he counted them. Five of them. Very well, he would die here, then. He pulled at his sword. “This is the only thing you’ll get from me, sirs,” he said. And then, though he didn’t expect any musketeers to be in this far flung area of town, far from their normal taverns, he yelled. “To me, musketeers. To me for the King.”
To his surprise, four men appeared running. And though one of them was de Termopillae, and therefore as good as half a man, if that, at the very least the odds were somewhat even.
Squaring off against Remy, Aramis thought that the day that four and a half musketeers couldn’t beat five guards of his eminence would be a sad day indeed.
Accidentally Stepping on Bottles; The Very Great Advantage of Knowing One’s Sphere; The Foal and the Lord
ATHOS
called for Porthos early morning, and was relieved to find the giant dressed and prepared to go out, polishing off a roast chicken by way of breakfast.
called for Porthos early morning, and was relieved to find the giant dressed and prepared to go out, polishing off a roast chicken by way of breakfast.
Athos’s stomach clutched at the savory smell and grumbled something to the extent that it had been far too long since Athos had eaten anything of the kind. Which was true. It had been far too long. The nobleman, who had grown up on game meat and, once upon a time, would have disdained the taste of tame fowl, now ate meat, of any kind, but rarely. Somehow, most of his money—and it wasn’t much, as he didn’t like to draw upon the domains he no longer administered for fear his cousin who was taking care of the land in his absence should ask too many questions— received from his musketeer’s pay or the occasional reward for extraordinary service seemed to run away from his hands faster than he could contrive to get it in them.
Truth be told, he knew he played too many games of hazard. He always lost at them and, in his more sane moments, was as likely as the next man to admit that his determined gambling could only be another way of punishing himself—one with his having assumed the musketeer uniform, one with his having cut himself off from all his old acquaintance. He also knew there was too much wine. Far too much. In the last few years, he, who had before always been somewhat more moderate than even a moderate drinker, had swallowed enough wine to float several ships at harbor. And yet . . . And yet, for all the liquor bought him a certain haziness, and sometimes—rarely—the ability to sleep, it hadn’t managed to erase his perfect recollection of his wife’s look, of the way she’d smiled at him on that day they’d set out together on their last hunt. The same hunt that had ended with his finding that the Countess’s shoulder was branded with a fleur-de-lis, and him hanging her from a low branch. The hunt that had ended her life. And his. In fact if he drank too much, he often thought he spied her ghost, just at the corner of his field of vision. He would turn and not see her, and yet when he wasn’t looking he always knew she was there.
Between the gambling and the drinking, he rarely had much money left and though his excellent servant, Grimaud, who’d served Athos’s family for many years, always contrived to turn bread and a thin slice of meat into some sort of meal, it was often too little and not very nourishing.
“Do you want some?” Porthos asked, looking up from his plate which was heaped with fully half the golden-roasted fowl, while the other half sat on its tray, waiting to be devoured. “
Holá
Mousqueton, bring a plate for Monsieur Athos.”
Holá
Mousqueton, bring a plate for Monsieur Athos.”
“It is not . . . I mean . . .” But before he could fully formulate that he didn’t mean to intrude on Porthos’s meal and that he didn’t require to be fed—all against the embarrassing and audible growling of his stomach—Mousqueton had set another place at the table, and put a napkin beside it, for Porthos observed, even in private, the careful etiquette of the greater houses. Quite defeated, Athos sat down and— with the knife provided—helped himself to the leg of the chicken, while Mousqueton returned to set a cup of wine in front of him.
One taste of the chicken confirmed what his sense of smell had told him—that the meat was excellent and deliciously seasoned. Slow roasted, too, and kept moist by some art that exceeded not only the abilities of Athos’s excellent Grimaud, but the abilities of Athos’s erstwhile cook at La Fere, as well. “I didn’t know—” he said, and realized he was about to say he didn’t realize that Porthos’s pocketbook ran to chicken these days, when all of them seemed to be subsisting on dried bread crusts and whatever they could manage to get in the way of invitations to dine. He stopped his words, but not in time.
Porthos, who so often had trouble putting his feelings into words, seemed to understand other people’s feelings and thoughts, even when incompletely expressed. He shrugged, as though Athos had said what he meant to say. “Mouqueton got it,” he said.
“I stepped on the poor creature by accident,” Mousqueton said. “There was nothing for it, but to put it out of its misery. And since it had been in the middle of the lane, I couldn’t quite tell to whom it belonged, so I thought it was easier to remove the source of dispute by bringing it home.”
Athos swallowed a mouth full and frowned at the meat in his hand. “But Mousqueton,” he said. “If the chicken was lying in the middle of the road, it might have been sick.”
Mousqueton sighed. “Oh, no. It was very healthy. I had the devil of a time, running it down so I could accidentally step on it.”
Athos marked the small smile on Porthos’s lips, and shook his head. After all, Mousqueton had grown up on the streets, living from his expedients. He supposed, in the final scheme of things, the chickens that people turned out on the street to feed on what they could find, were not in many senses truly owned. And yet, though he could eat it, he could not have gone out and got it himself. Or commanded Grimaud to get it. He ate another mouthful and drank half of his cup of wine, which Mousqueton promptly refilled from a bottle in his hand.
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