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Teach us, good Lord, to serve Thee as Thou deservest:
To give and not to count the cost;
To fight and not to heed the wounds;
To toil and not to seek for rest;
To labor and not to ask for any reward
Save that of knowing that we do Thy will.
~St. Ignatius Loyola, “Prayer for Generosity," 1548
THE RAIN FELL IN FREEZING SHEETS, soaking Milady’s stolen cloak and plastering it to her aching head and shoulders. Beneath it, her flesh chilled slowly from violent shivering into clammy immobility. The heavy weight of sopping clothing and outerwear threatened to drag her sideways from the saddle as her vision wavered in and out in unsteady waves. Rue d’Assas was almost completely dark at this hour, the lamp lighters having lost their battle against the elements earlier in the night. Weak, flickering light from the occasional candle or fireplace shone through the windows of those Parisians with nocturnal inclinations, providing just enough illumination for Milady to keep the feet of the exhausted nag she was riding moving in roughly the right direction.
Only an idiot would be out on a night like this.
An idiot, or someone whose desperation outweighed their self-preservation. Milady definitely belonged in one of those two categories right now, though the devil alone knew which. She swayed, her chin sagging toward her chest as her awareness once again narrowed to a cold, grayish tunnel, only to rush back when movement set her injured head pounding with renewed urgency.
The door on her right was familiar, part of a humble set of rooms attached to the end of a stable block. Light leaked through the slats of the shuttered window, proclaiming it to be the home of an insomniac. With a groan of relief, Milady let the reins drop, her weary mount coming to a stop of its own accord. She slid from the saddle with something considerably less than her usual grace, nearly collapsing in a heap into the filthy slop covering the street, as the jolt of her feet hitting the ground sent a new stab of pain through her temples.
Somehow, she managed to steady herself against the horse’s shoulder until she could push away, staggering the few steps to the door. Left to its own devices, the animal wandered away listlessly into the downpour, reins hanging loose. Milady pounded on the rough wood of the entrance, the rhythmic noise piercing her skull as if someone were driving a metal spike through the bone with a hammer.
A moment later, the door opened, revealing a pale, sharp-featured figure with dark, tousled hair. A fashionable, meticulously trimmed beard and mustache graced his attractively chiseled face, appearing somewhat incongruous when paired with the dowdy robes of a priest. Upon seeing her, the man’s expression transformed into blank shock.
“Aramis,” Milady said, and collapsed forward into his arms in a dead faint.
* * *
The throbbing of her head was the first thing she noticed when awareness gradually returned, some unknown amount of time later. The second thing she noticed was that she was warm and dry, lying on an unfamiliar bed with several blankets wrapped around her naked form. A roaring fire in the hearth nearby radiated welcome heat against one side of her face and body.
She groaned, freeing a hand from the blankets and raising it to her head, vaguely noting the bandage wrapped around her wrist. The flesh underneath was raw and painful. The rustle of clothing from nearby immediately had her wrenching open sticky eyelids despite the additional discomfort it promised, as she searched her surroundings for threats.
“If you’d sent word ahead that you were coming, I could have had a meal prepared,” Aramis said mildly from his seat in a chair next to the bed. “As it is, I’m afraid you’ll have to settle for bread and cheese.”
Milady relaxed minutely. “What... happened, exactly?” she asked, squinting in the low light.
“I was rather hoping you’d be able to tell me,” Aramis said, leaning forward to dab gently at her face and eyes with a damp rag. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
Milady batted him away with an irritable hiss. Bracing her sore head with one hand, she gingerly raised herself to an elbow as she cast her mind back. Everything was fuzzy and blank at first, until—
She lunged upright in a panic, the world tilting hard to the right as dizziness overtook her and threatened to send her straight back down into unconsciousness. Strong hands steadied her shoulders, and dark eyes, wide with concern, swam in her vision.
“Charlotte,” she choked out, trying to look past Aramis and see the rest of the room.
“She’s not here,” Aramis said, his grip the only thing keeping her from tumbling off the bed to land in a tangle on the floor. “I’m sorry—you arrived alone.”
Milady raised her other hand to her head, as if she could keep her brains from pounding their way out of her skull by physically holding them in place. “I don’t... I can’t...”
“Lie back on the bed, Milady, please,” Aramis urged, easing her down by the shoulders and tugging the blankets back up to protect her modesty.
As if she gave a tinker’s damn about her modesty right now.
“Aramis,” she asked, hating the neediness audible in her voice, “where is my daughter?”
“I am sorry,” he repeated, “but I’m afraid I know even less than you. How much do you remember? Do you remember the dinner party last week? The attack?”
“It was... the Flemish ambassador? Yes. And his aides,” she said hesitantly. “I remember... Olivier was irritated that we were hosting them at the house. He couldn’t stand the man, always talking non-stop and never saying anything of consequence.”
“And then?” Aramis prodded.
She shook her head, trying to jar the thoughts loose, but only succeeding in making her headache worse. “There was... a disturbance. Fighting.” A horrible doubt assailed her. “Is Olivier—“
“He sustained a broken leg,” Aramis said. “Worse than the time in Villerbon, I’m afraid, but it should heal eventually.”
“Where is he?” she asked. She needed to see him—she needed to—so he could fill in the missing chunks of her memory help her figure out what had happened. When the silence dragged on for more than a few seconds, she looked up suspiciously. Aramis enjoyed the sound of his own voice far too much to hesitate so unless there was good reason.
Indeed, his expression was uncertain in the low light. “I’m afraid he is currently residing in the Bastille,” he said.
“What? Why?” Milady asked sharply, ignoring the way her raised voice seemed to echo painfully between her ears.
Aramis sighed. “Cardinal Richelieu insisted, and under the circumstances the Queen could not refuse him. For some incomprehensible reason, your idiot of a husband is proclaiming loudly and at length to anyone who will listen that he masterminded the murders of the Flemish delegation and sent you and Charlotte away to safety so that the blame would fall on him alone. It’s all complete rubbish, of course.”
Milady felt the blood drain from her face alarmingly.
“Forgive me. I shouldn’t have said anything—not while you are still so weak,” Aramis said, berating himself. “Milady, you need to rest some more and regain your strength.”
“I’m not some blushing maiden to fall into a faint after every shock,” Milady snapped, forcing herself under control.
“No, you’re not. But you do have two separate head wounds from heavy blows. One appears to be several days old, and the other, fairly recent,” Aramis said. “Either one could have been enough to addle your wits; with both in such close succession, it’s amazing that you were able to make your way here at all, let alone in such vile weather. You could easily have died.”
“That isn’t important! I must know what happened to Charlotte,” she said.
“Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing that at the present moment,” Aramis said. “Now, the best thing you can do is try to take a bit of wine and bread, and sleep some more to give yourself time to heal. I will wake you periodically to ensure that the head injury does not pull you too deep into insensibility, and perhaps when you are rested, your memory will begin to return.”
Already, weakness was dragging at her once more, making it difficult to keep Aramis’ face in focus. She had only survived for all of these years due to an unusually high degree of hardened practicality, and though it pained her worse than any wound to sleep while her child was missing, she replied, “I don’t want food. It will only come back up. Give me wine, though.”
Aramis nodded and handed her a cup, supporting her head and shoulders so she could drink. She sipped at the weak liquid until her parched throat was soothed and her stomach started to rebel. Aramis took the cup back and eased her down to lie flat once more. Within moments, she was drifting. While she would not have put it past the slippery man on whose bed she now lay to have laced her wine with a sleeping draught in order to force her to rest, she acknowledged as her breath evened into a slow, deep rhythm, that at this point, it was probably wholly unnecessary.
* * *
As promised, Aramis roused her at intervals, waking her every couple of hours to check that she could, in fact, be woken. It was vexing enough that she snapped at him crossly each time he asked if she knew where she was, or who he was, or what year it was, but—being Aramis—he merely apologized for the necessity and continued to prod until she answered his damned stupid questions.
When she next woke naturally, the slanting light of evening was stabbing into her eyes from a western window, and there were muffled voices coming through the door from the front room. Experimentally, she rolled onto her side, levering herself up into a sitting position by slow, wincing degrees. When her head merely threatened to roll free from her shoulders rather than actually falling off, she looked around the small room.
Locating, in order of importance, first the chamber pot and then her clothes, she rose unsteadily to relieve herself and get dressed. Her wrists were still bandaged; she unwrapped them, revealing livid bruising and red marks in the pattern of a rope. After donning her camisole, she picked up the dark blue dress and stared at it. It had been one of her finest, but was now torn and stained with filth. As she held it in her hands, a flash of memory assailed her.
“Anne!” called Olivier in a sharp tone of warning, barely keeping two swordsmen at bay with the fireplace poker that was his only weapon. His opponents continued to herd him inexorably toward the top of the grand staircase leading down to the main level of the sprawling old house.
She whirled just as the man approaching her from behind her grabbed her arm, the delicate material of her sleeve tearing under his fingers. The dagger she always kept hidden in her skirts was already in her other hand, but her assailant deflected the feint with startling force, sending the small blade flying and leaving her unarmed. She tried to knee him in the groin, silently cursing her heavy skirts and impractical shoes. The man twisted; the blow landed off center and with less force than she’d hoped. He grunted in surprise, but only tightened his grip on her as he cursed in Spanish.
She jerked back hard in an attempt to take advantage of his distraction, but the fingers clamped around her arm were like claws. The pair spun around each other in a twisted parody of a dance, giving her a clear view of her husband just as one of the men he was fighting charged under his guard, sending them both crashing down the staircase.
“Olivier!” she cried, as the pair tumbled out of sight.
In her moment of inattention, she barely saw the flash of a gloved fist before it came crashing into the side of her head.
Milady came back to herself when her knees hit the unforgiving stone floor of Aramis’ bedroom. There was a clatter as the chair she’d knocked over on her way down hit the floor an instant after she did. The voices in the other room paused, and a knock came at the door.
“Milady?” Aramis called. When she was unable to answer immediately, he added, “I’m coming in.”
The door opened only enough for him to slip in before he closed it behind him.
“Ah. You’re up,” he observed unnecessarily. “Or, at least, you were up briefly before falling over and breaking a perfectly good chair. That’s progress of a sort, I suppose.”
His hands were gentle as he helped her regain a seated position on the edge of the bed, the ruined dress still clutched in her hands.
“I’ve remembered something,” she told him.
“I’m pleased to hear it,” he replied. “Will you allow me to assist you in dressing and help you to the other room, where there is a chair with all four legs still attached? You can sit down and tell us about it.”
She nodded very carefully, not wanting to set off her pounding head any more than necessary.
“Who else is here?” she asked.
“Porthos and d’Artagnan,” Aramis said. “Don’t worry—I sent for them in secrecy. To any observers, they are merely joining an old friend for dinner. I think it’s quite evident, though, that the two of us are going to need some additional help with this situation.”
“You’ve placed them in an awkward situation, Aramis,” she said. “If Olivier is being held for murder...”
“Yes, I’m afraid I have, at that,” he agreed readily. “However, it's not the first time, and I doubt it will be the last. Besides, you know full well that they’d string me up by the mustache ends if they found out later that you and Charlotte needed help, and I hadn’t told them.”
It was true enough, she supposed. When Queen Anne had elevated de Tréville to the position of Secretary of State for War, and Olivier had accepted the title two years ago of Secretary of State of the Maison du Roi, Porthos had stepped in as captain of the revitalized Musketeers regiment with d’Artagnan as his lieutenant. While they were both passionately devoted to France and to the Crown, they had proven many times over that their greatest loyalty lay with their friends.
Aramis had already entered the priesthood by the time Porthos was promoted to the captaincy, having joined the faculty of the newly formed seminary of the Archdiocese of Paris—an institution in whose creation he’d played a significant part. His status as the second son of minor nobility, along with the prominent role he'd played in Anne's return to the throne, had gained Aramis several perks including the small set of private rooms in which Milady currently resided. Though the four former soldiers of the Queen’s Guard-in-Exile no longer lived in each other’s pockets, they were still closer than most brothers. This attack on Olivier—and, by extension, on her—would never go unpunished now that they knew of it.
By way of an answer, Milady handed Aramis the dress and allowed him to help her up and assist her into it.
“Forgive me,” he said when he had to pick a length of ribbon loose from the eyelets of her corset and re-lace it. “It appears I've become a bit rusty at this.”
“Out of practice, I take it? Chastity doesn’t suit you, Aramis,” she told him. “It never has.”
“Well, perhaps someone will petition our Heavenly Father at some point and get Him to loosen that particular restriction,” he said, giving the laces a small tug to underline the final word. “Until then, I’m afraid it’s part of the trade-off involved in becoming a member of the clergy.”
“Nonsense,” Milady huffed as the familiar squeeze of the corset compressed her ribcage. “Richelieu parades his mistresses at court as if they were prize trophies. He’s not unusual, either—your own archbishop has been seen disappearing into the private rooms of Mme Vichy on more than one occasion recently.”
“Ah, but you speak of bishops and cardinals, Milady, while I am but a humble priest. I will not say that ordination has miraculously removed all of the desires of the flesh,” Aramis continued, tying off the laces, “but I feel that I must at least make the attempt. Now, come speak with d’Artagnan and Porthos. The four of us have much to discuss.”
She allowed him to support her with an arm around her shoulders as they made their way slowly to the front room where, as promised, Aramis helped her into an undamaged chair. Porthos and d’Artagnan rose as she entered, a study in opposites—one tall and broad-featured, bulging with muscle but affable and stolid; the other, whippet-thin and intense, no longer the broken boy that had wandered into their lives almost a decade ago, but still prone to occasional recklessness and bursts of passion.
Her relief at seeing them was an unlooked-for weakness, but having them all here with her was honestly not too much different than having Olivier here. And... even if he were free, Olivier could not be here. She had realized immediately after her flashback of the attack that she could not possibly face him in person without first knowing Charlotte’s fate.
“Milady,” Porthos said in his rumbling voice, stepping forward to bestow a heartfelt kiss on her hand, “Thank God you’re safe. We feared the worst.”
“I think Athos has gone mad,” d’Artagnan said, looking like he wanted to fidget but restraining himself with some difficulty. No doubt Olivier’s inexplicable protestation of guilt was weighing heavily on the younger man, who still more or less worshipped the ground her husband walked on, even after all these years.
“Right now we must find out what has happened to Charlotte,” she said. “Olivier will have to wait.”
The three men shared a look that made Milady’s skin prickle with disquiet, but before she could pursue it, Aramis said, “You told me you’d remembered something new?”
For a moment, she was once again poised on the landing above the staircase, feeling her stomach drop as if she was the one tumbling down the stairs like a broken doll, not her husband. She swallowed, dragging herself back to the present.
“We were hosting the Flemish ambassador and his aides for dinner. Afterward, Olivier invited them up to his study for brandy. I was readying Charlotte for bed when half a dozen men broke into the house. There was fighting—when I ran out of Charlotte’s room, Olivier was taking on two armed men with a fireplace poker. Another of the intruders overpowered me; I saw Olivier fall down the stairs right before my assailant knocked me unconscious.”
“Two of the Cardinal’s guards went to the house the following day when the ambassador failed to arrive at the palace as expected,” Porthos said. “They found Athos just inside the front door with a broken leg. He must’ve crawled there from the bottom of the staircase and passed out from the pain before he could reach the door. Other than him, the house was empty expect for your servants and the Flemish delegation—all of them dead.”
She sucked in a sharp breath upon hearing of the deaths of their two young servants.
“How did they die?” Milady asked, forcing herself to focus on the facts that they had, rather than thinking of the light fading from Reinette and Frédéric’s eyes, or of Olivier pulling himself across the marble floor inch by inch, his twisted leg dragging behind him.
“Two had their throats cut,” d’Artagnan said. “All the others were run through.”
“The Cardinal’s got it into his head that Athos only invited the ambassador to dine with him so he could get him alone and kill him,” Porthos said, “which would be bad enough if Athos weren’t proclaiming to the skies that it happened exactly that way.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Milady. “The ambassador had four aides. Three of them were young, fit men. Was he supposed to have murdered them all single handedly—as well as his own servants—only to trip and break his leg attempting to flee the scene of the crime?”
“They’re saying he hired accomplices to help him, but they ran off afterward when he was injured,” Porthos said.
“No. The man who attacked me spoke Spanish,” Milady said. “This is part of a larger plot.”
All three of them appeared very interested indeed at this new revelation, once again exchanging looks that spoke volumes.
“I know you’re all hiding something,” she said, feeling exhaustion wash over her even though she’d only been awake for a few minutes. “You might as well tell me and get it over with.”
Porthos cleared his throat, looking uncomfortable. “As far as the outside world is concerned, the Flemish ambassador was just assassinated by Queen Anne’s Secretary of State of the Maison du Roi. Flanders is under Spanish control, so as you can imagine, King Philip isn’t taking it too well. France and Spain are teetering on the brink of war... a war that France is in no position to fight, or even to pay for.”
Of course. With her mind still so muddled, she hadn’t stopped to fully consider the wider consequences of Ambassador van Claes’ death. Her companions still seemed far too worried, however.
“And...?” she prompted.
D’Artagnan broke first, as she had suspected he would. “And... Spain is demanding Athos’ immediate and public execution as a traitor,” he said, all in a rush. “The Queen is resisting, of course.”
Oh.
She realized that she had been staring at the three of them for several seconds without saying anything, as their expressions faded deeper into worry. She swallowed, trying to return some moisture to her throat.
“Well,” she said with admirable steadiness, “I did say there was a wider plot involved.”
* * *
Want to read more? The Queen’s Musketeers: Book 4 is available now!
