Norsemen had dreamed of such as him in the guise of Thor, beating an eternal forge. They probably had failed to imagine his gilded baldric, the rope of gold that surrounded the brim of his hat, or the multiple jewels that flashed from each of his powerful fingers. Most of them glass, if D’Artagnan knew his friend, but splendid looking nonetheless.
Porthos shook his head, giving the impression of utter bewilderment, as he asked the guards, “
Mon Dieu
, can’t four friends meet to go to a dinner without bringing you down on them with your edicts and your . . . your . . . I know not what to say . . . Your regulations? The precious orders of your . . . Cardinal?”
“But, monsieurs,” the guard pointed out reasonably. “Surely . . .” He shrugged, not in a show of lack of knowledge, so much as in total bewilderment. His bewilderment, his meek pose were an affront to D’Artagnan’s mind and heart. “Monsieurs, surely—” He looked around at the immediate surroundings, where the scuffed ground, two broken swords, and a trail of blood leading, speakingly, to the door of the convent, all spoke a recent fray. “Surely you see . . . There’s been a duel here.”
“Oh, and if there’s been a duel, we must be to blame, eh? Very pretty reasoning that,” Porthos boomed. “That’s the musketeers. Always dueling. Easy thought. And wrong. We were going to a dinner.”
D’Artagnan, who found none of this funny, and whose blood lust was rising at the guard’s refusal to face him, spoke only through clenched teeth, to repeat yet again, “En garde.”
“But—” the guard said, and opened his hands in a show of desperation. His companions, two smaller, darker men, stood with hands on the hilts of their swords, but did not draw.
Aramis sighed, heavily—the sort of world-weary sigh that could be expected from a man who claimed that he was wearing the uniform of a musketeer only temporarily, until he could attain his ambition of becoming a priest. Hearing it, no one could guess that his seminary education had been interrupted years ago when a gentleman had found Aramis reading the lives of saints—at least that was what he swore he’d been doing—to his sister and challenged Aramis to a duel, thereby forcing Aramis to kill him.
“If you must know,” he said, looking up from an intent examination of his nails and speaking in a voice that implied that no well-bred person would push the point so far. “We heard the moans of the injured and we stopped to render assistance. I am, as you have probably heard, all but in orders, and I thought perhaps I could give some comfort to the dying.”
The guards looked from one to the other. “You’re telling us that you came to help other men?”
“Very good of us, it was,” Porthos boomed. “In fact we behaved like true Philistines.”
The guards looked up at him with disbelief, and even D’Artagnan was forced to look over his shoulder at his giant, redheaded friend.
“I believe you mean Samaritans, Porthos,” Athos said, and coughed.
“Do I?” Porthos said, then waved airily. “All the same, I say. All those people were the same, anyway. Always giving their aunt’s wife’s donkey in marriage to each other.” And with such a cryptic pronouncement, he said, “D’Artagnan, if they apologize, will you let them go?”
D’Artagnan shook his head. No. No and no and no. Their very apologies would only enrage him. The truth was that the guards had come, of course, just at the conclusion of a duel arranged by the musketeers the day before. They’d arrived just after the musketeers had dispatched their opponents and helped the wounded carry the dead to the convent.
And now they persisted in their nonsensical quest to arrest the musketeers—without drawing sword, without raising their voices, without in fact, even calling attention to Porthos’s blood-smeared sleeve or the noticeable tear that rent the sleeve of Athos’s doublet on the right side.
They not only had found out that the musketeers were going to duel—in itself this was not a great mystery, since the duel had been called in a tavern over a handful of noblemen’s refusals to drink the King’s health—but they refused to fight.
D’Artagnan’s scornful gaze accessed the guards’ middle-aged countenances, their pasty faces, the fact that each of them carried the sort of extra weight that a few duels a month burned off and judged them to be nobodies. The sort of nobodies given a post in the guards to appease some family connection or some powerful nobleman.
They wouldn’t fight because they couldn’t. And if D’Artagnan slaughtered them all, the best to be hoped for would be that he would be everywhere known as a killer of the defenseless. There was no honor in a killing such as this. There would only be shame in winning, and losing was unthinkable.
Sending them was, in fact, not only an insult, but a cunning ploy of the Cardinal’s. The sort of ploy the snake that ruled behind the throne of France was well known for. And D’Artagnan’s friends didn’t even see it.
D’Artagnan stamped his foot, in hatred of the Cardinal and in fury and frustration at his friends. “Draw, or I slaughter you where you stand,” he said, knowing only that to back out would be shame and to continue forward would be disaster. He was caught in the Cardinal’s trap.
The sound of running feet didn’t intrude into his mind. He did not look until a well-known voice called, breathlessly, from the side, “Monsieur, monsieur.”
D’Artagnan turned. Planchet had been left safely in D’Artagnan’s lodging, at the Rue des Fossoyers. Planchet would not come here, like this, much less think of interrupting a duel without very grave reason. Reason so grave that D’Artagnan couldn’t even imagine it.
All this was in his mind, not full thoughts, not fully in words, as he turned, sword still in hand, still lifted, to see his servant—his bright red hair standing on end, his dark suit dusty and stained as if he’d run the whole way here— leaning forward, hands on knees, a respectful distance from him. “Planchet, what is it?”
And the guards attacked. D’Artagnan heard the sound of swords sliding from their sheathes and turned. He was barely in time to meet head-on the clumsy rush of the blond guard.
“Ah, coward,” he said, only vaguely aware that Porthos and Aramis had joined the fray on either side of him, taking on the blond’s assistants. D’Artagnan parried a thrust and made a very accurate thrust of his own, slitting the man’s doublet from top to bottom and ending by flipping his hat off his head. “Would you duel with a real man?” he said.
The blond had a moment to look aghast at his torn clothing, cut with such precision as not to touch the flesh beneath, and to bend upon D’Artagnan a gaze of the purest horror. His lips worked, but no sound emerged.
And D’Artagnan, his mind viewing the man and his fear as only a move in his chess game with the Cardinal, thought he glimpsed an opening, a way out of the trap of honor in which he found himself. He lunged forward, saying, “You think you can stand up against the musketeers? Don’t you think it will take more than that to face the men who have so often proved superior to his eminence’s best guards?”
“That’s right,” Porthos said. He had, with easy bluster, inflicted a minor wound on his opponent’s arm and was grinning as he prepared to parry a counterattack that might very well never come. “That’s right. We’d rather die. Be cut to pieces right here, than allow you to arrest us.”
“At any rate, monsieurs,” Aramis said, from D’Artagnan’s right. “It would be a more merciful and quicker way to die to allow ourselves to be killed here than to face the wrath of Monsieur de Treville.” There was still a tremolo of amusement to his voice, and D’Artagnan wondered if Aramis had begun to glimpse both the trap and the way out. Or if he, cunning as he was, had seen it all along, and before D’Artagnan did. “So we die here, monsieurs, but you cannot arrest us.”
And in that second something broke in the leader’s eyes. He looked down at his torn doublet that showed a dubiously clean linen shirt beneath, then he looked quickly up at D’Artagnan. And then his sword clattered to the ground and, before D’Artagnan could gracefully accept his surrender, the man had taken to his heels, running fast over the ice-crusted fields, slipping and standing and slipping again.
His men, clearly treasuring following their leader over value, dropped their swords so fast they seemed like echoes of his, and did their best to catch up with him.
“Well played, D’Artagnan,” Aramis said. “I was wondering when you’d see their surrender or preferably their flight was the only way out of this for us. The only way with honor.” His lazy smile, the paternal tone of his words, implied that he’d seen this all along. D’Artagnan wondered if it was true. With Aramis it wasn’t easy to say. Aramis himself might not know.
“Poor devils,” Porthos said, looking after the fleeing men. “They were as set up for this as we were. And the wrath they face from the Cardinal makes what we’d face at Monsieur de Treville’s hands seem almost gentle.” He took a deep breath, straining the expanse of his broad chest. “The affront is the Cardinal’s. I wish it were possible to challenge him to a duel.”
“He was a good enough duelist in his youth,” Aramis said, his tone deceptively light.
And D’Artagnan wondered if his mad friends, who hated the Cardinal for many good reasons as well as many foolish ones, would suddenly decide to challenge the Cardinal.
He opened his mouth to remind them that men such as his eminence didn’t fight with their swords but with the might of the kingdom, when Athos spoke, “D’Artagnan, attend. This is grave business.” He held a letter in his hand—its seal broken—and waved it slightly in D’Artagnan’s direction.
“Grave?” D’Artagnan asked. He sheathed his sword and stepped towards Athos. “What is it? From whom? And for whom?”
But the words died on his lips. He’d got close enough to recognize his mother’s hand, the rounded, convent hand that she’d been taught as a young girl. His mother? Writing to him? Normally his father did.
And Athos was alarmed, as doubtless had been Planchet to run all the way over here. With shaking hand, D’Artagnan plucked the sheet of paper from Athos’s unresisting hand and brought it up in front of his eyes, focusing on the writing.
“Dear son,” the letter started primly. “I regret the obligation of it, but I must call you back from Paris at a very short notice. You see, there is no one else to claim the name or the domain. There is no one else to take up the care of the lands, or even to look after me.” D’Artagnan blinked in confusion at the words, wondering what his mother could mean, and almost had to force himself to read on. “Your father departed this world on Monday, a week ago. Today is the first time I’ve had the time and solitude”—
Solitude
was heavily underscored—“to write this letter to you. For you must know that though they say it was a duel, I cannot be easy about your father’s death. He had, after all, been looking into your uncle’s affairs and I think he was doing it at the behest of that great man, Cardinal Richelieu. Of course, no one else knew this, either that he was looking into things or about the Cardinal, but a woman knows these things.”
Knows
was, again, deeply underscored. “You know how your father valued you and trusted you. I can’t tell this to anyone else. Please, hurry home, son, and take up your rightful place in this household.” It was signed in a tremulous hand with what read like Mauvais D’Tortoise but D’Artagnan could guess to be his mother’s signature— Marie D’Artagnan—distorted by emotion.
But . . . what emotion? D’Artagnan could barely absorb the contents of the letter.
His father dead? From a duel? Impossible. Monsieur D’Artagnan, père, had taught his son to such effect that even the most famous fighters in Paris could not best him.
A murder disguised as a duel? Impossible again. D’Artagnan’s mind ran over the place of his childhood, those domains that he’d described often as smaller than the Cemetery des Innocents in Paris.
D’Artagnan’s father had grown up there and, save for the brief time at war, lived there, in those villages and fields. There was no one there who’d raise a hand against him. It would never happen.
And yet . . . His father was dead. And his father had been working for the Cardinal?
Every feeling revolted, and the print seemed stark and cold upon the page. D’Artagnan felt a sob trying to tear through his throat and fought it back with all his might, with greater strength than he’d ever had to employ against a human enemy.
He took a deep breath. His voice came out reasonably controlled. “You are right, Athos. This is grave. I’d best attend to it.”
“Of course,” Athos said. “When do the four of us leave for Gascony?”
1
Death of a Musketeer; The Musketeer’s Seamstress.
4
Here we see one of the many instances in which Monsieur Dumas tampered with the timeline of acquaintances and events. And, of course, there have been hints dropped over the years that Madame Bonacieux’s actions were not quite those portrayed in the book. Here we see her much longer acquaintance with D’Artagnan and the reason for his great attachment to her and their relationship.