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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  The Impossibility of Murder; Where Aramis Questions His Sanity; A Naked Fugitive

  A Hierarchy of Branches; Running from Fate; Where Fear Gives Not Only Wings, ...

  A Fugitive in Need; Where Four Show They Think Like One; A Fine Predicament

  Where Strength Is Tested; The Sad Lot of the Musketeer’s Servant; The ...

  The Inconvenience of a Murdered Noblewoman; Athos’s Doubts; Aramis’s Anger

  The Wisdom of the Tavern; A Musketeer’s Regrets; An Unpleasant Decision

  Where Three Musketeers Can Slow Six Guards; The Fine Points of Gascon Honor

  A Council of War; The Various Kinds of Seamstresses; The Memory of Husbands

  Secret Passages and Palace Maids; A Count’s Connections and a Gascon’s Loyalty

  The Prodigal Musketeer; French Manners and Spanish Mourning; Regrets of Exile

  Kitchen Wenches and Maids; Food for Thought; A Musketeer’s Loyalty

  A Musketeer’s Misgivings; Where Memory Intrudes Upon Life; D’Artagnan’s Innocence

  Cooks and Maids and the Secrets of the Fire; The Distinct Advantages of an ...

  The Prodigal’s Awakening; Brushes and Mirrors; Monacal Disciplines

  Where Old Friends Meet; The Count and the Duke; A Country Gentleman’s Estate

  Cooks and Maids; Holes and Tunnels; Food and Love

  Where Families Are Proven to Share More than Coats of Arms; A Musketeer’s Capitulation

  Where Dead Wives Mean Nothing Near Horses and Vineyards; The Happiness of a ...

  Of Sons and Heirs; Where Love Is Not Guilt; An Inconclusive Leave Taking

  The Best Intentions of a Novice; Dark Eyes and Dark Thoughts; A Message from ...

  Cardinals and Passageways; The Slowness of the Quick; Porthos’s Wisdom

  A Letter from the Cardinal; Choices and Conflicts; The Inadvisability of ...

  Floors and Ceilings; A Secret Panel and a Masked Stranger

  A Musketeer’s Scruples; Between Girdle and Garter; A Decision Made

  A Masked Ghost; Dead Woman’s Jewelry; The Immovable Porthos

  The Prodigal Musketeer, Revisited; The Sins of Musketeers; Nowhere to Hide

  Where Locked Doors Aren’t Always Impassible; Secret Passages and the Jealousy ...

  Footprints and Somersaults; Ghosts and Words; Monsieur Porthos’s Very Deep Doubts

  Messengers and Queries; The Elusiveness of Musketeers; Where Aramis Gets Tired ...

  The Drawback of Good Jewelry Stores; The Horrible Suspicion; Attacked in the Night

  Blood and Wine; Guards and Thieves; The Prey Turns Hunter

  A Gascon’s Lodging; The Secrecy of Salves; Where Musketeers Must Walk Even ...

  Where Porthos Discovers the Virtues of Recessed Doorways; The Guards of the ...

  Evening the Odds; Two Gascons and a Musketeer

  What To Do with a Fugitive; Where the Cardinal’s Guilt Is Agreed Upon, but ...

  D’Artagnan’s Theory; Athos’s Explanation; Porthos’s Ghosts

  Porthos’s Clarity; The Greatest Need; Porthos’s Duchess

  Porthos’s Theory; Families and Friends; The Accountant’s Abode

  The Matter of the Knife; A Dead End

  Fire and Color; The Very Deep Reasoning of Porthos; Where Aramis Becomes ...

  Dancing on a Rope; Not Everything in a Dress Is a Lady; Ghosts

  Mirrors and Vows; Holy Grudges; The Guilty Party Begs Clemency

  Aramis’s Guilt; The Confession; The Plan

  Porthos’s Doubts; Aramis’s Appeasement

  Sins and Atonements; Where Aramis Refuses to Bend

  Cardinal Doubts; Cardinal Sins; The Importance of Church Latin

  Teaser chapter

  The Many Inconveniences of a Sin of Vanity; Flying and Fighting; Murder Done

  Doubt of a Musketeer

  “You were surprised at finding her dead, then?” Athos asked.

  “Of course he was, Athos, what a question,” Porthos said. “Who would expect his lover to be killed?”

  Athos didn’t answer Porthos, but looked steadily at Aramis, whose gaze showed an understanding of Athos’s question.

  “I was,” he said. “Shocked. I’d only stepped to this little closet beside her room, in which she keeps—kept a chaise perceè for . . . such needs as arose. Only a few minutes. And I came out to find Violette dead. I was quite shocked. Though . . .”

  “Though?” Athos prompted.

  Aramis sighed. “Though in the next few seconds, as I contemplated the locked door, the impossibility of a passage into the room, the inaccessibility of the balcony, I wondered if I . . .” Again he floundered, and he gestured with his hands, as if expressing the inability of language to translate his meaning. Then he rubbed the tips of his fingers on his forehead, as if massaging fugitive memory. “I wondered if I could have committed the monstrous deed and forgotten all about it . . .”

  The Musketeers Mysteries by Sarah D’Almeida

  DEATH OF A MUSKETEER THE MUSKETEER’S SEAMSTRESS

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  THE MUSKETEER’S SEAMSTRESS

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / April 2007

  Copyright © 2007 by Sarah Hoyt.

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  The Impossibility of Murder; Where Aramis Questions His Sanity; A Naked Fugitive

  THE Chevalier Rene D’Herblay—better known for some time now as the musketeer Aramis—was sure that no one could have murdered his mistress.

  A tall, slim man whose long blond hair and normally elaborate attire made people underestimate the very solid muscles now on display, Aramis stood naked in the doorway of her room. His numb hands gripped the wooden frame for support, because his knees had gone unaccountably lax. He looked out, unbelieving, at the huge bed that took up a quarter of the bedroom.

  The bed was high and heavy and massive—a solid construction of Spanish oak that had probably come in Violette’s dowry when she’d married a French duke. Upon the oak, soft draperies had been heaped, to make the bed suitable for someone of Violette’s soft skin and softer habits— there was lace and velvet and a profusion of pillows of all shapes and sizes.

  Aramis knew that bed better than he knew his own. He had been Violette’s lover for two years and he’d spent considerably more time in her bed than his. At least time awake.

  He grasped the doorway hard, for support, and blinked dumbly at the bed. Because on the bed, Violette lay. Violette who, only minutes ago had been lively, full of fire, eager for his embraces and inventive with her own.

  Now she lay . . . He felt sweat start at his hairline, a cold sweat of fear and disbelief. And blinking didn’t seem to change the scene his eyes showed him.

  Because Violette could not be dead. And yet she lay on the bed, motionless, her normally pink body gone the color of cheap candle tallow, her mouth open and her eyes staring fixedly at the canopy of pink satin over her.

  Between her perfect, rounded breasts that his hands and lips knew as well as his eyes did, an intrusion—an ivory handle—protruded. And around her breasts, there was blood, dripping into the lace and pillows, the satin and frills.

  Aramis swallowed hard, fighting back nausea and a primal scream of grief that wanted to tear through his lips.

  His mind, still in control, feverishly went over and over the reasons why this was impossible.

  First, he’d left her alive when he’d gone into the small room next to her room where—out of modesty or high breeding—she kept the chaise percée used for calls of nature. Second, he’d taken no more than a moment there. He was sure of it. And he’d heard no doors close or open anywhere. Third, the door to the room was locked—had been locked when they first lay down together. He’d turned the large key himself, heard it click home. Fourth, they were three floors up in the royal palace, with sentinels and guards all around and thick walls encircling the whole structure. And there was only one small window in the room—too small to admit anyone—and a door to a narrow balcony well away from other walls and trees. The balcony was large enough, only, for two people to stand close together. The bed was too low to the floor to conceal anyone beneath it.

  No one could have come into the room. And Violette was not the sort to commit suicide. Or to commit it with a knife to the heart. No woman was. This Aramis—who knew many women—knew. They were more inclined to the poison that would pluck them from life while they slept. Not that he’d ever had any of his mistresses die this way. But he’d heard about it. He’d . . . read.

  He struggled to stand on his own, pulling his hands away from the doorway. If Violette couldn’t be dead, ergo, she must be alive. And if she was alive this must all be a tasteless joke.

  Trying to stand steadily, he took a deep breath and inhaled the sharp, metallic smell of blood. But Violette would be thorough in her jokes as she was in everything else. It would be real blood. Animal blood. Yes, that must be it.

  He charged forward, to the bed, and put out a hand to shake her hand resting, half-closed, on the frilly coverlet near a pool of blood that seemed more abundant and darker than he’d have imagined possible. It was soaking into the fabric and probably into the mattress beneath.

  “Violette,” he said. This close he could see the blade of a sharp dagger disappearing into the flesh, and the wound into which it plunged, and the blood . . . Blood was only trickling out now, but it already looked like there was more blood on her than there should be in any human being. “Violette,” he said. “I am offended. This is in extremely poor taste. You must know—”

  His hand touched her arm. Before he could control himself, he jumped back, his hands covering his mouth, but not in time to hold back his shocked scream. She felt . . . not exactly cold, but not as warm as living flesh should feel. Blindly, he reached forward, grasped the handle of the knife, pulled it. It came away in his hand, stained red and dripping. It had truly been buried in her flesh. And her skin felt dead.

  Aramis knew dead. He’d killed men enough in duel and in combat ever since that day, when he—still known as Chevalier D’Herblay—was barely more than nineteen and a young man had caught him reading the lives of saints to the young man’s sister. Well, at least that was what Aramis still told everyone he had been doing. The truth was somewhere closer to his having demonstrated to the young lady the biblical intricacies of the word know.

  The young woman’s brother had objected and challenged D’Herblay for a duel. And D’Herblay, knowing instinctively that his fashionable looks, his command of Latin grammar or even his wielding of sharp rhetoric would not get him out of this situation, had looked for the best fencing master in Paris, Monsieur Pierre Du Vallon. So good had Du Vallon’s lessons proved that D’Herblay had killed the prudish young man. Which, since dueling was forbidden by royal edict and punishable at the end of the executioner’s blade, had led to D’Herblay’s and Du Vallon’s going into hiding under the assumed names of Aramis and Porthos in the uniform of his majesty’s musketeers.

  Since then Aramis had fought more duels than he cared to think about. His and Porthos’s acquaintance with a disgraced nobleman who called himself Athos and with a young Gascon hothead called D’Artagnan had done nothing to make his life more peaceful. Among the four of them, one or the other was forever challenging someone to a duel and calling on all his friends to serve as seconds.

  He’d killed men, he’d seen corpses—Aramis heard his lips, loudly, mutter a string of Ave Marias—but never one murdered like this, in the safety of her room, in the privacy of her boudoir. And not while only Aramis was present. Not while only Aramis could have done it.

  His hand over his mouth, the other hand gripping the bloody knife, he’d backed up until his behind fetched up against one of Violette’s innumerable, amusing little tables, covered in more lace, velvet, satin, and stacked high with books she never read, her command of written French being shaky and her interest in the written word being far secondary to her interest in other pastimes.

  Through the roaring in his ears, he was dimly aware that people were knocking at the door and at least one, female voice, was shouting a string of Spanish names, followed by other, equally Spanish words. The names were Violette’s. Her real name was a string of proper names—starting with Ysabella—followed by a string of surnames, all connected by y and de which Aramis could not hope to understand or remember. Ever since—on a cold night, when he stood guard at the royal palace—she’d approached him and told him her name was Violette, he’d called her that and nothing else.

  But the knocking on the door seemed like a distant worry. Closer at hand, Aramis was grappling with his soul. Ever since his father had died, when Aramis was no more than two, Aramis’s pious and noble mother had decided her young son was bound for the church. So, wherever his path took him, he dragged with him the excellent, thorough and insistent religious education his mother had given him.

  Even now, in uniform for many years, Aramis considered himself a priest in training. As soon as he cleared his name enough for some order to take him, he would take orders.

  He was aware of the serious and grave sins he committed with Violette who was, after all, married to some French nobleman l
iving in the far provinces. True, her marriage had been one arranged to match the marriage of the Queen, Anne of Austria, her childhood companion and friend. Violette, to hear her talk, barely knew her husband, with whom she had not spent more than the two weeks of the wedding festivities. He enjoyed rural pleasures, and she’d lingered at court with her friend the Queen. And she’d found Aramis.

  And there, Aramis thought, lay the crux of the sin, for they’d sinned often and in very imaginative ways. And had not, perhaps, some angel reached from heaven to smite with ivory dagger the cleft between Violette’s perfect breasts?

  But the banging on the door grew more insistent and Aramis’s knowledge of Latin allowed him to guess that the Spanish-speaking woman wished to know who had screamed and why. She would not be appeased by anything but Violette’s voice. A voice that would not be heard, again, till the angel of the apocalypse sounded the final trumpet.

  Naked, scared, shocked, Aramis stood and stared at the door which shook under the impact of many hands, many fists.

  Cold sweat ran down his face. He felt his hand tremble. He’d never trembled in battlefield or field of honor, but this . . . This supernatural retribution, he could not endure.

  And yet, if an angel had struck, would he not have killed both of them while they were abandoned to their pleasure? And why would an angel wait until Aramis went to the little room to attend a call of nature?

  Despite his education—or perhaps because of it, for, after all, it had included logic—Aramis had an analytical mind which shouted over the vapors of his fear and the madness of his religious guilt to tell him that a human hand had killed Violette. A human hand not Aramis’s.

  Perhaps, he thought, there was a tunnel into this room? After all, any palace of any age at all had more tunnels, secret passages and hidden rooms than a rabbit warren had exits.

  But, looking around the room, he could not imagine where the tunnel would open. Every available palm length of wall had one of Violette’s cabinets, tables, chaises leaning against it. And all of it was solid, heavy Spanish furniture which would not be moved by a simple door springing open behind it.