“Don’t even think on it,” D’Artagnan said. “I mean to make peace with Constance as soon as possible, and I’m sure she’s very brave and she would gladly offer to help, but the truth is, my friends, she is a delicate lady, gently nurtured and-”
“I know a lady who would delight in it,” Athos said. “She lives for danger and madcap defiance of odds.”
“You do?” Aramis asked, looking at him, at the same time that the other two echoed him, and D’Artagnan continued, “You know a lady?”
“Well,” Athos said, and smiled a little, with his old irony. “Certainly that can’t be any stranger than Aramis knowing a man.” And without giving them time to realize he’d made a joke, “The Duchess de Chevreuse would, I’m sure, lend herself to our schemes. If only Aramis asks her nicely. And you see, because she knows Aramis so well, if Pierre Langelier tried to tell her she’d mistaken them one for the other…”
“Her denial would carry force,” Aramis said. “By the Mass, Athos, I believe you are right! Get me writing paper,” he said, to the room at large. “And a pen. And ink. I shall send her a note right away.
“Shouldn’t you find out what you are supposed to tell her, first?” Athos asked, his voice vibrating with amusement. “Like… where she should meet us, and what we should do?”
“Not at the workshop,” Porthos said. “Too many swords, and those hammers, and perhaps his friends too. We could never guarantee her safety.”
“No,” Athos said. “It must be someplace that he thinks he’s utterly safe.”
“I’ve got it,” Aramis said, and his own shout set his head aching again.
Where His Musketeerness Discusses a Plan; The Advantages of Dealing with a Shifty Character
“SO you didn’t talk to him that night?” Aramis asked. “Yesterday night? After we went back.” He had tracked Marc’s and Jean’s farms-they were brothers-in-law, and their farms adjoined each other-after he’d found the place on the edge of town where they’d dropped off the oxcart. The family there, distant cousins of Marc’s, had been able to direct him.
On horseback, and at his speed, he’d gotten there in an hour instead of ten, and now he stood by the black horse he’d borrowed from Monsieur de Treville’s stables, and discussed the matter of their plan and their need of a place with the two rustics.
“Well, we talked to him, in fact, and he’s supposed to marry Marie. We didn’t tell him that we’d thought we’d put him a box,” Jean said, looking sheepish.
“No, I imagine you didn’t,” Aramis said. And he didn’t imagine that Pierre knew that part either, else he would not have had his friends waiting for Aramis-he would have sent someone to find what he’d learned from his acquaintances in the country. Or to kill him halfway home.
He looked at the two of them, in their smocks and clearly in the middle of their working day. Would they be able to understand him? They hadn’t struck him as stupid. A little… different perhaps, but in no way worse than Porthos. Their curious approach to life, in any case, had probably saved his life.
Deciding, suddenly, he poured out the story to them, of how they’d realized it was Pierre ’s doing, and of what they proposed to do about it. After he was done, they were silent a long time, and then Jean looked at Marc, “I knew it. Or at least I suspicioned it all along, because, you know what Marie is like. She always falls for bad lots. Remember what she was like with that one-legged peddler.”
Fascinating as the idea was, Aramis did not wish to pursue the case of the one-legged peddler. Instead, he said, seriously, “I know you’ll think that I should, in fact, do my best to find one of his armed friends who would be willing to confess, but…”
“Oh, no, your musketeerness,” Marc said. “That would be fatal, because it would tell Pierre you know. It would not at all do. After all, he owes them money. They wouldn’t want him arrested till he can pay.”
“But you want him to marry your sister,” Aramis said. “Wouldn’t that be the same situation?”
“Not at all,” Jean said. “As your musketeerness knows, or you would not have come to us, would you? With us, as long as Marie marries him, she’s all right, as far as her reputation is concerned. What happens afterward…” He shrugged. “In fact, if Pierre is the sort to go about murdering people, I’d much rather he doesn’t stay around, after he marries Marie. What if he decided he could use my money too? I could be mortal in a tomb, before I knew what hit me. No, your musketeerness, you can count on our help.”
“We’ll bring him over,” Marc said. “To discuss the details of the wedding, we’ll say. And the settlements. Of course,” he said, “we’d best have the priest on hand to marry them before you take him off to face justice. That of a certainty we must do.”
Where Athos Courts Danger; And a Lady Takes Up Arms
ATHOS intercepted the lady as she came out of her carriage. He’d managed to do it by telling Aramis that he, more subtle and experienced at the nuances of such things, should keep an eye on the discussions within, with Pierre Langelier, who looked like a rather coarser Aramis, sitting at the table and arguing that he needed far more money to take the hapless Marie for his wife.
Besides, Athos had told Aramis, quite mendaciously and remorselessly, Aramis was needed on hand in case one of the two farmers needed reassurance and came through the door from the kitchen into the little pantry, where the musketeers hid behind vast jars that Athos presumed contained butter, but might very well contain wine.
And so, while Porthos, Aramis and D’Artagnan stayed in the pantry and followed the negotiations that were little more than delay tactics, Athos-whose anxious ears had picked up the faintest sound of wheels in the yard-went out to receive the lady.
She had driven in very quietly, so that the sound of her horse’s hooves, the noise of the wheels, could be mistaken for nothing more than a carriage going by on the nearby road. But it was her carriage, with the De Chevreuse arms on the door. She descended from it, heavily cloaked, but in a cloak of cream satin, and when she threw the hood back from her head, her blond hair glimmered under the moonlight.
He bowed to her. “He is a murderer,” he whispered. “But we will be in the pantry and ready to come to your rescue. I hope you’re not afraid.”
She turned her head up to look at him, her eyes glimmering insolently and shimmering with excitement. “If I told you I was afraid, would you kiss me for courage, Monsieur le Comte?”
He felt like a knot at his throat and managed a quickly stifled chuckle. “I’m not that brave,” he said.
He escorted her to the door to the kitchen-not the door to the pantry, to which he hurried, to rejoin his friends.
When he got into the darkened pantry again, she had knocked and been admitted, and Marc was saying, “But I’m not sure I want you to marry our sister, at all. Not unless this lady is mistaken in her report.”
“What report, what?” Pierre said, half rising from the table.
“That I saw you kill Hermengarde in the palace gardens,” Marie Michon-for Athos could not doubt it was her, and not the more proper, or at least more socially conscious duchess that stood there-said. “You asked her to meet you and then you ran her through with the sword.”
“Bah,” Pierre said, and an ugly flush came to his cheeks, and made him look very much not like Aramis. “And who will listen to you?”
“I think everyone,” Marie Michon said, drawing herself up, and supplementing her scant inches with the force of her personality. “Do you know who I am?”
“A busybody?”
“No. I’ll have you know I’m the Duchess de Chevreuse.”
“Oh, I still say you are a fool of a woman, and that you saw wrong. Everyone knows it was the blond musketeer.”
“No. Of a certainty it wasn’t. The blond musketeer is a good friend of mine, and I’ll be willing to swear to any magistrate that he was with me at the time.”