Mousqueton shrugged. “I happened to have some cord in my sleeve,” he said.
Porthos nodded, still bewildered. Mousqueton’s ability to not only carry the oddest objects about his person, but to keep them there despite very thorough searches had long since become one of the musketeers’ jokes. What he couldn’t understand was how the rope might have helped the young man get the bottles.
Mousqueton grinned, and taking a looped cord from inside his sleeve, showed Porthos how he had a sort of noose at the end of it. Dropping it through the hole, he got the neck of a bottle. The very process of pulling up the rope tightened the noose, and this brought the bottle, wobbling and shaking, up to the hole in the floor. [8]
“You are extraordinary,” Porthos said.
Mousqueton blushed a little. “To own the truth,” he said, “the hardest part about the whole thing is to put the flagstone back, and make sure some dirt is swept back into the crevice, so they don’t look there.” As he spoke, he put the stone back in place, and dragged his foot to sweep some dirt into the crevice. Then he returned to his dish. “But you did not come here,” he said, pulling the cork out of the bottle by means of the little thread inserted there for the purpose, “to ask me about my ways of getting wine, and probably not either, to bring me pigeons, though I thank you, and Madame Coquenard for the thought.”
Porthos shook his head. “Nothing to do with her. I got it from the palace kitchens. It was lying on a table, and no one was guarding it.”
“Monsieur Porthos, I am proud,” Mousqueton said, bowing, a little humor in his eyes. “And all for my sake?”
“No. Or rather, yes, but…” In a tumble, he related everything that had been happening, omitting only Hermengarde’s death. He tried, but when it came to it, he couldn’t bring himself to tell Mousqueton that story. The thing was, in recent times, he’d seen Aramis survive the death of his lover-if indeed he had survived it. There were still days that Porthos wondered. And he suspected that Aramis wondered too. And he’d seen the look on Athos’s face when speaking of his long-lost wife. He simply couldn’t face seeing Mousqueton’s expression crumple like that. Not while the poor man was here, away from Porthos and from all his friends who might support him and comfort him.
So, absent that one distressing fact, Mousqueton listened to everything intently. “She was going to accept my proposal, then?” he said.
“You didn’t know that?” Porthos asked.
“She’d never yet told me,” he said. He looked somewhat worried. “Is she…”
“I think she is well,” Porthos said, crossing his fingers as much as might be, and telling himself that he was after all speaking of Hermengarde’s soul, which would, doubtlessly, be in heaven.
Mousqueton frowned, which seemed like a very odd response to such a question. “The thing is, monsieur, you see, that Pierre Langelier is a very good-looking man. He looks a lot like Monsieur Aramis, in fact. And though I was willing to marry her, to… you know, raise her child as mine, I wanted to make quite sure that that was all over before I did. One thing is to marry someone knowing they made a mistake once, and another and completely different to marry her and know you are going to be cuckolded lifelong. One I was ready to accept, the other one never.”
“Hermengarde said-says that you were suspicious of her relationship with the armorer’s son, but that, in her heart, there was never any other but you.”
“In her heart…” Mousqueton said, and shrugged. “Perhaps not. But in her arms there was.”
“Are you sure of this?” Porthos asked. “Or is it just your unfortunately suspicious nature?”
“Oh, my nature, surely, but my nature is greatly bolstered by my having walked in on her, in her sleeping room at the palace, in Langelier’s arms. He has this uniform… at least it is not really a uniform, but a blue suit, of such cut and style that it makes him look like a musketeer. I suspect this makes it easier for him to get into the palace, and he’d got into the palace, and when I came in…” He shrugged. “I don’t wish to describe it. Let us just establish the child could be either of ours.”
Porthos thought that Athos would say that women were, after all, the devil. But Porthos could not echo it. The thing was, with the lives they lived-the lives they all lived-they might be alive in a month and they might not. Porthos knew how much women craved security. Even his Athenais, whom his death would not leave either destitute or abandoned in the world, was known to scold him most fiercely for his perceived failings-particularly those that regularly put him in the way of men animated by a murderous intent and armed with sharp, pointed objects. She was, for some reason, convinced that Porthos did it only to vex her.
How much more would a woman feel that way, if she were dependent on the man for her chances at a future and at her child’s future at that?
Mousqueton seemed to read Porthos’s mind in his eyes. “It wasn’t, you know, that I didn’t understand her. Of course, I did. He might be a gambler and a bit wild, but he was the heir to a thriving business, a man with something to himself, some substance to spend.”
“And were you talking to his father when…” Porthos started. “I mean, what do you remember happening? Exactly?”
Mousqueton rubbed the top of his head. “The devil of it,” he said, “is that I only remember very confused things. I remember waking up, of course, and the corpse right here, and Faustine screaming her damn fool head nearby. And then, before I could fully open my eyes, for the infernal pain in my head, the Cardinal’s Guards were there, holding me. It was a devilish thing.”
Porthos nodded in understanding. “But nothing before that?” he said.
Mousqueton sighed. “I remember going in with sword and… working out some terms.”
“Terms?”
“Oh, he wanted…” Mousqueton shrugged. “He wanted one of us to find out exactly where and how much his son owed. It seems his gambling habit is worse than I’d thought, and his father wanted to know everything he owed. Of course…” He hesitated. “He was couching it all under the terms that if Pierre had truly blotted his copy book that badly, he would disinherit him. Something about sending him to the country, to be a smith, which I know for a fact he wouldn’t do, since Pierre is one of the best armorers in the country and his father was very proud of it. But he was saying that he would, you know, like people talk when they’re very upset. And he said that all his money and his business would then go to Faustine.” He rubbed his hand backwards through his hair, as though trying to comb it. It did nothing but increase the wildness with which it fanned around his face. “As though, you know, I could marry her for a few more coins…” He shrugged. “And as though I had any idea what to do with an armory. He was telling me, I remember, something about how the man he had trained-not Pierre, but the apprentice-could run it for me very profitably, and all I’d have to do was keep Faustine happy.” He frowned. “Which wouldn’t be such a bad deal, if only I thought anyone could.”
Where Monsieur D’Artagnan Wakes Up; The Strangeness of a Strange Bed; Fleur-de-Lis
D’ARTAGNAN woke up. The bed felt wrong. Too soft beneath him, and too hot too, as he appeared to be sinking halfway into a feather bed. The covers above him were far too suffocating, also. They increased his feeling of being hot, and also made him feel as if he could barely breathe.
He threw them back from his body and tried to think. He’d gone to dinner with milady, last night. That much he remembered. And also that milady had given him far too much wine. But how had he come to be naked on her bed? He could not remember. Probably the wine.
A look to the side showed him that she was under the covers, awake, looking at him. “Are you ready now, Monsieur le Guard?” she asked, her voice seductive, rising from the welter of sheets, her high breasts all the more prominent-seeming by being encompassed in a froth of silk.
[8] He repeats this trick later on, in the quite different circumstances that Monsieur Dumas related. It must have seemed incredible to Monsieur Dumas, who perhaps lacked the access to these documents, because he found it necessary to explain such a brilliant piece of deductive theft by relating it to the customs of the North American continent.