D’Artagnan shrugged. “I don’t even know. I was walking. I lost track of where I was.”
From Athos’s disdainful smile, D’Artagnan perceived that Athos thought he’d been thinking of Madame Bonacieux, anyway. And let him think that, for D’Artagnan had.
Leaving the still furious fight behind him, D’Artagnan started towards his house, feeling for her embroidered handkerchief within his sleeve.
An Odd Avocation; Poison in the World; Belladonna
IT was cool morning as Aramis headed for Friar Laurence’s workshop. It was in fact one of those beautiful mornings where the world appears newly minted or recreated. The normal stink of Paris seemed muted, as a cool breeze blowing from the river brought with it freshness and untainted air.
Early morning, the city looked like a woman just awakened, Aramis thought, and not yet having put on her makeup or her public attire. Most windows were shuttered. From far off came the sound of a horse’s hooves on cobbles. From somewhere else, in the nearer distance, the sounds of a woman calling out something, and of a child crying. Other than that, it was stillness, punctuated with birdsong, here and there.
If you closed your eyes, it would be possible to imagine that you were in a small village, somewhere, surrounded by bucolic solitude.
Only Aramis didn’t close his eyes. He looked around, instead, at the tall buildings around him, at the shutters opening, here and there. Down the street, a woman threw open her door and walked out to sweep the street. Elsewhere, a man’s voice rose in round, full singing.
It was this Paris that Aramis loved. Or perhaps, truth be told, it was one of the parts of Paris he loved, for he loved the evening Paris, too, shrouded in darkness and full of secret alleys and fraught encounters in the streets. And he loved Paris in the afternoon, languid under the sun, the streets filled with passersby.
The city was like a woman, and like any woman she exerted an hypnotic fascination over Aramis. In his heart of hearts he had to admit that was part of what held him away from the church, to which he always said he was destined. The truth was he could no more leave Paris than he could be truly celibate. Not yet.
He hastened away from the center of town and towards the suburbs, where there were more people awake and signs of life in the workshops and forges. Farther still, down beaten-dirt streets, he found himself standing in front of the Benedictine monastery-an imposing stone facade with small, deep windows that would allow the light in, but not the prurient curiosity of a glance out at the street to see who might be passing.
Again, as always when he approached such places, Aramis asked himself what it would be like to live within, in the sacred silence, with ordered days and specified times for every task. Oh, obedience didn’t frighten him. He had to obey now. He obeyed Monsieur de Treville. He stood guard when he must and he went on travel for the captain when he must. He came when bid, and he fought whomever the King ordered. No, obedience was not a problem.
And poverty… well… Despite his lace and velvet, the well-cut clothes upon which he spent much of his money, the truth was that no musketeer was truly rich. The wolf of famine often rounded the musketeer’s door and very, very often was admitted in.
No-of all the three it was only chastity that bothered Aramis. And not just the vow of chastity that would prevent him from touching female flesh again, but the vow of chastity that would bar him from looking at women, from taking a material interest in the day-to-day life of the city and of his neighbors and of the court too.
Chastity stood before the door of the monastery as a stumbling block stopping Aramis on his way to taking vows. And yet… He sighed and knocked at the heavy oak door.
It was presently opened by a cowled monk in a black habit. Upon seeing Aramis, he bowed and mumbled his welcome, as Aramis had been known at this house since he was just a young seminarian newly sent to Paris to be educated.
“I have come to see Brother Laurence,” Aramis said, and was waved through, his presence here being customary and so well known that they wouldn’t bother even to escort him down the long, cool hallways, the shadow-filled darkness of the monastery.
An ancient building, constructed of massive stone blocks, it seemed designed to keep the world out, though the Benedictines were not a cloistered order and indeed often worked within the world as teachers, physicians and other avocations. But within here, it was all fresh and silent and Aramis once more felt the tug to leave the world behind and consign himself to unvarying holiness. Only, he remembered the call of the streets outside too well to obey.
He hastened faster down the hallways, towards the back of the building where they’d set up Brother Laurence’s workshop. The figures who met him on his way nodded to him and he nodded in response. That none of them remarked upon his presence nor even seemed to notice his rather gaudy-today a deep blue-velvet attire, nor the discrete bits of golden ornamentation upon it, which contrasted as much with their black habits as a bird of paradise’s plumage would contrast with a crow’s, only told how accustomed a presence he had become within.
Brother Laurence’s workshop was open, and Aramis went in-into a labyrinth of shadows and shelves, of strange materials bubbling in glass apparatuses, and other, more difficult to understand vessels. Metal and clay and little contained flames were all around. From the ceiling of the workshop hung dried bunches of herbs and also a stuffed crocodile whose purpose Aramis was loath to enquire. On shelves, distributed more or less haphazardly, sat jars filled with odd fluids, or else with bits of animal and plant. Again, Aramis didn’t ask about them unless they came up in some conversation or brought up in some discussion. He had a vague idea that most of them were unpleasant or at least unsavory.
“Ah, D’Herblay,” Father Laurence said. He popped up around a set of shelves with every appearance of a jack-in-the-box coming forth from the confined space. Truth be told, he looked more than anything like one of those trained monkeys that court ladies kept around for show, only slightly bigger and slightly less hairy. His features were almost entirely simian, his nose just slightly more prominent than that of a monkey. And his eyes, like a monkey’s, peered dark and preternaturally intelligent from deep sockets. The black cowl around his face made the whole look incongruous, like a child’s prank or a lady’s idea of a joke.
That he was grinning inanely with pleasure at Aramis’s visit would have alarmed a man who knew him less well. But Aramis only smiled and said, “You know very well, Brother Laurence, that I have laid that name by and will not resume it until I think myself purged of my sin and capable-”
“You’ll not resume it until you’re done playing the musketeer, ” the little man said, waving the rest of Aramis’s intended speech away. “Come, come, I am no fool. Aramis, then, if you insist on being Aramis. Glad to see you. It’s been at least two weeks, and I haven’t told you any of my new experiments. I’m almost sure I’ve found an herb to suppress cough. You know, in winter it is often the cough and the tiredness of it that kill our aged ones.”
Aramis had never been able to understand why Brother Laurence assumed that Aramis had the same interest in his herbal medicines that he himself possessed, save that, he supposed, the little man got to speak with precious few people. His brothers, doubtless, not being fools, avoided the workshop if they could. Aramis always thought that had been the reason to locate it at the back of the house, facing the still sizeable backyard.
Oh, doubtless, it also made it convenient for Brother Laurence to tend to the herbs and trees and cultivate the odd plants that were part of his materials. But at the same time, it took him out of the main flow of the house, so that no one need pass by the workshop unless he meant to go there.