Chapter Ten

 

“The king wishes to make an example of la Belle Dame sans Merci,” D’Artagnan said as he and Athos strode from the Louvre under a sky growing charcoal gray with night’s warning.

An hour had passed since they’d had Emmanuelle escorted to the dungeon below the royal palace following her bold statement. Athos could not simply allow her to ride off after such a confession. But he could not shake the vexing feeling that all was not as it seemed. Had he done the right thing in allowing her to be locked away?

“How did word of her arrest reach the king’s ear?” he wondered aloud. “You know I wanted to be extra careful with this one. Damn it, I gave her my word!”

“You gave your word to someone unworthy. She confessed, man.”

Athos clenched his fist and punched the air. Their strides took them toward the rue de Seine. D’Artagnan wanted food; Athos needed to walk off the guilt riding his spine.

“She confessed to the marquis’s murder,” he said. “A murder for which, I remind you, we have no proof and no body.”

“Perhaps it was burned to ash? Besides, why confess to a crime she did not commit?”

“The very question I ask myself,” Athos said.

“You suspect as much? That she is lying about the murder?”

Athos did not answer. He had held his hand over her heart. Beneath his palm had pulsed a proud beat. Not frightened. But neither had it seemed true. He was sure her confession had been a lie.

A beribboned street player bobbed before them, then seeing their grim expressions, dodged from their path as his indigo ribbons brushed Athos’s legs.

“She is a murderess. She must hang,” D’Artagnan reiterated. “Accept the fact that not all women are blushing cheeks and satin lace. Some can be more deadly than the plague.”

“What of the Duchess de Chevreuse’s claims there are others from the Brotherhood of Justice currently in Paris? You yourself hinted at a possible conspiracy against Mademoiselle sans Merci by them.”

“True. But, Athos, she confessed.”

“Yes, but when given the opportunity, why did she not name the Brotherhood? Or even blame them? If she has truly escaped their tyranny, as she claims, that would be the logical action.”

“Perhaps she fears retaliation?”

“To her dead body? She is to hang, D’Artagnan. Thanks to that damned lettre de cachet. It demands immediate punishment. I should have torn it up when I had the chance. Who informed the king? Whom did you tell of her capture? We were the only two who knew she was in Paris.”

“No one. And we escorted her ourselves. Perhaps Franck at the door to the dungeon cells?”

Athos smacked a fist into his opposite palm. “So she hangs? As simple as that? Did the king not order her questioned for her crimes associated with the Brotherhood?”

“Afraid not. Louis wants to make this quick. You know the king’s relationship with Les Grandes is sensitive.”

“More like cowardly. Louis cannot risk showing favor to an enemy like la Belle Dame.”

“So she will be an example. A sacrificial lamb to appease Les Grandes and keep them from Louis’s wig.”

“Louis the Just,” Athos ground out. He wasn’t certain the king deserved the moniker after today’s events.

They clattered toward the marketplace bordering the glossy brown river Seine, their leather soles crushing the loose pea-gravel paving the wide path before them. Freshly spiked hay drew a trail from the cobbled street to their destination. A bent, wiry old mendicant hobbled along the stone wall overlooking the river, in chase of a plump brown rat to serve him a good meal. Hawkers’ songs of “Plump pears!”, “Knives sharpened!”, “Smoked halibut and goat cheese!” and “Bawdy stories to entice!” filled the air.

So that was it? Mission complete. What had come of his valiant plans to listen, to learn the whole truth before judging? A confession had been proffered, that was what. Albeit, a suspicious confession. Emanuelle Vazet was no murderess. He knew it as well as he knew his own tattered soul.

But the king had decreed she hang. And Athos always obeyed.

“Despite the charges, she is lovely,” D’Artagnan remarked.

Athos chuffed out a breath. “As pretty as nightshade or a thorned rose.”

“Athos, forgive me. I should not have allowed word of her arrest to reach the king’s ear. I’ll see Franck is properly beaten.”

Athos stopped before the gate to an apothecary shop set away from the bustle of the market square. He gripped the curved ironwork arabesqued across the top of the gate. Overhead, bare branches of twisted oak formed a lattice canopy.

Even as he spoke, he regretted the words, “What’s done is done.”

“Is it?” D’Artagnan queried.

“What the hell does that mean?” Athos twisted his head and eyed the lieutenant uneasily, sensing the matter would not be so easily brushed away. “D’Artagnan?”

“It doesn’t bother you that this entire crime will be so swiftly swept away?”

It bothered him immensely. As much as it pained him to speak so, he said, “Let the wench hang.”

D’Artagnan pressed a hand to his shoulder. “And what if the marquis is still alive?”

The lieutenant was ever naïve to the inner workings of Athos’s soul. Why could he not just drop the subject?

“The valet—what was his name? John Francis?—witnessed his murder,” he countered.

“You were not there to test his confession.”

“I must trust your judgment of the boy’s sincerity.”

“Do you?”

“D’Artagnan, my fine Gascon friend, why this sudden turnabout? You are an able leader of men, of sound judgment. You have learned much in the years I have known you. Of course I trust you. Would you doubt yourself?”

“Well…I suppose not. But there is no body. And the marchioness—”

“De Marle’s widow?” Athos asked. “You have spoken to her?”

“No, and that is exactly my point. No one has spoken to the marchioness. Nor has she come forward in the wake of her husband’s alleged brutal murder. Is that normal?”

Athos scoffed. “Perhaps she mourns in private.”

D’Artagnan nodded. Then his tone grew serious. “What if what Mademoiselle Vazet told us true? What if the marquis did murder the widow de Beaux?”

Athos pressed a hand to the man’s shoulder. “I’ll tell you. Such a circumstance would allow la Belle Dame to murder the marquis, for certainly he did not have a suicidal wish.”

“In self-defense, perhaps?” D’Artagnan persisted. “Out of fear for her own life?”

“Self-defense?” Athos rubbed his fingers across his beard and snorted out a disbelieving chuckle. “You conjure some incredible notions, D’Artagnan. That woman leveled me with a dexterous kick to my jaw. See here? It still hurts. Trust me, she is deadly even without a pistol.”

Athos turned toward a voice calling out, “Foamy beer!” But more than the lure of oblivion, he did not want his friend to see the uncertainty on his face. Put this behind you, his instincts screamed.

And yet, his heart would not allow him to stop his speculation.

“Why, of a sudden, do you care?” he asked D’Artagnan, knowing he was asking as much of himself. “You were there when she confessed.”

“I was there.” D’Artagnan crossed his arms over his chest and spread his feet to a defiant stance. “And I was looking at you as well as at her. You favor that woman, Athos.”

“Nonsense.”

“But instead of admitting your interest, you use the wench as a weapon—I don’t know—against your pitiless soul?”

“What?” Athos stared, incredulous.

“Emmanuelle Vazet clearly represents the one woman you have not been able to put from your mind. She may very well be a dangerous woman who deserves justice, but only before judge and jury. We both know that. You do not want to make the decision for her punishment. Not again.”

“You are mad.”

“Thankfully, the king has already made the decision, and so you stand absolved.”

D’Artagnan followed as he stalked over to the beer hawker. Athos paid the man to fill his flask from the spigot attached to a half-barrel set in his cart. He drank the entire contents, then flipped another copper sou to refill.

D’Artagnan trailed closely behind as Athos tried to march away. “Milady de Winter is the past. She cannot be resurrected.”

“Do not speak of that woman,” Athos gritted out.

“And yet you resurrect her every morning you rise. She lives in the very air you breathe.” He dogged Athos relentlessly. “She dances at the bottom of every tankard you lift. She is dead, Athos. Gone. Start anew. Do not continue to chase after every dangerous woman you encounter in an attempt to change what happened.”

Athos swung around and gripped D’Artagnan by his shoulder, pressing him against the side of a wooden cart overfilled with mushy winter straw. “I was this close to slamming the door on my service to the king. This close!” he roared. “You were the one who set me to this task. It was you who said I was the only man for the job. And now you dare to admonish my choices?”

His friend held up his hands. No challenge. “Athos, do not do this.”

“You have done this, D’Artagnan. Not me.”

His friend soughed out a breath. “If that is what you wish to believe.”

Struck by the truth of the man’s words, Athos released his grip on D’Artagnan’s shoulder.

Was he using Mademoiselle Vazet to wipe his conscience clean?

Already he had gone against his sworn oath to be fair, to remain impartial until proof had been provided. But she had freely admitted her identity. And any question of the marquis’s death was surely balanced by the overwhelming proof of la Belle Dame sans Merci’s crimes against les Grandes.

And by the fact it had been the king who had declared her guilty, not him.

“Listen to me, Athos. I admire you as a brother. And that is why I cannot allow you to dismiss Mademoiselle Vazet so easily. For your sake. Not hers.”

“And what am I to do? First you urge me into pursuing her, and now you change your song. Where is Aramis when a man needs him? It should have been the priest you set on that woman’s trail, someone with the capacity for compassion.”

D’Artagnan grasped Athos’s doublet. “You have compassion, Athos. But you allow the past to blind you to the genuine grace that lives in your heart.”

“A cold heart.” Athos pulled from his grip. “Nothing but ice.”

He paced to the market square and kicked at a rotted herring fallen from a hawker’s cart. The touch of D’Artagnan’s hand to his shoulder, instead of relaxing him, made him stiffen.

“Return to your desk and your paperwork, D’Artagnan,” he growled.

His friend shook his head. “No. Let us go to the marchioness. Just check things out. Hmm?”

Furious, Athos drew out his rapier, slashed it through the air, and released it. It flew to the right, stabbing deep into the wood of a nearby stable door. The jeweled hilt twittered back and forth between him and his friend.

“You’re asking me to get involved,” he said through a tight jaw.

“I know. I ask a hell of a lot more of you than I should.”

“You do.”

“But you are already involved. Emotionally. Admit it.”

Athos released the tension in his jaw and closed his eyes. He did not subscribe to the emotional games men and women played. Life was too difficult as it was to involve the heart. Not that he ever succeeded in that attempt.

Never.

That single word compelled him. Beckoned him to discover the truth. For behind the hard façade Emmanuelle showed the world, lived a woman of a sort he had not before known. And against all better judgment, he wanted to know her. More than he had ever wanted to know a woman.

Was it curiosity? No, the compulsion was stronger. A need. As if, perchance, Emmanuelle Vazet might feed his barren soul.

“Very well. We will pay the marchioness a visit.”

* * *

Emmanuelle woke to discover she lay on a surface of tightly bound rope, a trundle that had been pulled from beneath the wood-framed bed that rose immediately before her. Rumpled white linens fell from the bed to dust her shoulder. She lay covered with only a simple wool blanket stinking of must and mildew. A bitter chill enveloped her bare toes.

Swiping aside her hair from her face, she gasped back a cry of fear.

Where was she? What had happened last night?

And then she remembered. She had hidden in the forest for what seemed days. It could have been no more than a few hours, for the night had not drifted away in the time she’d sat shuddering against the base of a mushroom-frilled oak.

She’d heard footsteps. Had feared they searched for her, that the same band of king’s men who had killed her father and mother had come to strike her dead. The men who had beheaded her father had worn the king’s coat. Emmanuelle had always known Henri Vazet opposed the king, but to bring such punishment to his family?

The underbrush rustled. Instead of a command, or worse, the click of a musket, Emmanuelle heard a kind voice.

“Come, child.”

And now, here she lay, curled in a fetal position, staring at the sun’s white rays slowly painting the parquet floor. She wiggled her toes in an attempt to coax the warmth closer.

“Fear not, my pet. You will have your revenge.”

She twisted at the waist, toward the voice from the bed, but did not look up. She couldn’t bring herself to look up into the man’s eyes. He must be kind. He had rescued her from certain death. But she lay in his bed chamber. Though she had not been violated, nor made to feel physically uncomfortable, this did not feel right.

But the revenge he promised did feel right.

Very right.

Emmanuelle woke with a start. Heartbeats pounded at her temples. She had been dreaming of that horrid night. And the strange morning that had followed. Everything had changed with the swing of a royalist’s blade to her father’s neck.

Your memories deceive you.

Indeed. For it had all been a careful lie. The one who had delivered the fatal blow had not been a king’s man, but one of the very Brotherhood she had grown to respect.

And she had not learned the truth for well onto a decade.

A night spent lying on cold, stale straw and a hard stone floor did not make for a pleasant rising. But it was a familiar one. Emmanuelle pressed up with her hands, sliding along the wall until she sat upright. She blew snarls of dark hair from her lips and eyelashes. Rubbing her palms briskly together brought little warmth to her hands. When she pressed them to her face they cooled.

She knew it was morning, for the narrow slit near the ceiling that held four short iron bars let in a brilliant slash of golden light. But it was not warm. Nothing was warm.

Least of all, her heart was not warm. It shuddered inside her ribcage. Much as it had ten years earlier when she had hidden in the forest, terrified of being discovered. Fear again held her beating heart in bony fingers.

No, it was not fear, but anticipation. She had learned long ago that fear only weakened. She was not weak.

A heavy exhalation formed a cloud before her mouth. This little cell below the Louvre was like an icy crypt long forgotten in the middle of a war-ravaged field. But it was not the Conciergerie. And for that she was thankful. If she was to hang for her crimes, she would not go broken and pleading for mercy.

No, it was the trade of la Belle Dame sans Merci’s to make others plead.

Emmanuelle tucked her head into her hands. So she would hang today. For an unthinkable act she did not commit. But she would not swing for naught. By all the crying saints, she deserved as much. La Belle Dame sans Merci had committed crimes, despicable acts against the nobility, according to les Grandes.

And yet, it had been just—the treatment she had dealt upon their self-righteous heads. But only just in the eyes of the Brotherhood. She had punished those nobles who stood judge and jury before the weak, the innocent. Turned the tables, and let them feel the unfairness themselves.

Someone had had to do it, yes? For who would speak for those peasants the nobles had suffered even more horrendous crimes? She, she had been their voice after they had been maimed, beaten, even murdered.

“It was right,” she murmured. “Or rather, just.”

Sometimes just acts looked wrong to others, Michel had warned her. And she would be persecuted if ever caught.

And now she was caught.

Lieutenant d’Artagnan had reported the king’s grim disfavor and his decision to make an example of her.

An example. Little mystery, there. The king merely wished to appease les Grandes. It was more surprising she had not been tortured in the square for all to witness. Such an event would attract every noble for leagues around.

Of course, there was yet time for the display.

After all she had been through, all the narrow escapes, the near misses with the hangman’s rope, now it would come to this. That she would suffer for a crime she had not committed. If she weren’t so damn cold she would have laughed at the irony.

Should she have faced torture? The boot? The Question? Perhaps she was a coward not to stand her ground.

No. She had to protect Firmin and Jeanne from the Brotherhood’s wrath. They would survive without her. But not if the Brotherhood sought revenge.

Yes, please. Emmanuelle prayed for their good fortune. Firmin and Jeanne were kind people. They deserved so much she could not give them. If only there were some way to transfer ownership of the Vazet lands to Firmin before she hanged.

Last evening she had thought this trip to Paris would be over quickly. “Just a mistake, Mademoiselle Vazet. So sorry to have made such a heinous accusation. We have thoroughly investigated the crime. The marquis is the real murderer.”

But was he? When last she saw le Retrousser he was alive. Bleeding, but alive. Definitely not a fatal wound.

And what had become of Monsieur Athos during the interrogation?

Emmanuelle had thought the musketeer sympathetic to her plight. He had given her his word of honor. And she had believed him. Had wanted to trust those dream-sky eyes. She had thought him different. One like no other. A man who—in the stolen moments they had shared in the alley—had taken a piece of her for himself, and in return, had planted a bit of himself inside her.

But he had shown her his true colors. He hadn’t even dared face her when she was taken to a cell and told she was to hang.

Emmanuelle ground her molars across one another, her jaw tightening in a muscle-twanging clench. Inability to act made her restless. She could not sit in this stinking cell to await her own death. Springing up, she paced the pounded dirt floor. She could have done with a leather skirt and breeches to keep back the cold. What had she thought, dressing in such a feminine manner? To appear sympathetic? To impress the musketeer?

Fool!

She did not want to impress the bastard. She wanted to press her fist into his gut!

She needed freedom from this cell, so she could find proof she had not committed the crime. The valet, he was the key. The lieutenant reported he was a boy of nine or ten. The hand of a mere child had dealt her fate. Where had he been that he’d seen her and she had not noticed him? The carriage, perhaps? She had watched the marquis exit the carriage, but had not given it a second glance as she’d fled the widow’s home. She had been so fixed on her destination she had not taken in her surroundings. Truly, six months away from the Brotherhood had diminished her skills.

Pacing from wall to wall stirred warmth in her veins.

A piece of information was missing. She felt sure some morsel existed that would clear her name of wrongdoing. It was there, just out of reach. But no matter how she stretched for the answer, she grasped but air.

She needed freedom. To escape. On to another new start. To hide—

No!

The thought of running from her past for the rest of her life was unacceptable. She must take a stand and face this challenge head on. That, or surrender to fear.

“Never,” she whispered.

And so, she would become an example.

La Belle Dame sans Merci?

Wrong. She did have mercy for those who in turn offered mercy. But for those who did not—let them suffer.

As would she.