On My Lady's Honor (Secrets of the Musketeers Book 1) Page 8

  Coward, Sophie thought to herself.

  “Dirty little gutter rat,” muttered the blond Musketeer, aiming a filthy look at the thief.

  Still, he was their best chance and they knew it, so they both followed him. For the next half hour, he led them a merry dance, over rooftops and walls, into courtyards, under archways and through dirty back alleys. Sophie’s side hurt with running and her feet were rubbed raw on the harsh leather of her boots. The blonde Musketeer beside her was panting heavily.

  At last the thief stopped, and they doubled over, their hands on their knees, to regain their breath. “I think we’ve thrown them off the scent.”

  The sound of a bugle close by made them groan. The chase was not yet over.

  Sophie thought of her blistered heels with near panic. She wasn’t sure she could run another step. “Or maybe not.”

  The thief shrugged his shoulders. “We should get inside if we can. That horn is only for show. They won’t find us now if we can get off the street.”

  The surroundings were completely unfamiliar to Sophie. All she knew of Paris was her lodging house and the street that ran to the barracks. She was utterly lost. “Where are we?”

  The street the thief named was of no help to her. The blond Musketeer, however, brightened up at the name. “My lodgings are only a quarter mile away. They’re big enough for all three of us to hide out there until the hue and cry dies away.”

  Much as she misliked this suggestion, Sophie had no choice but to accept. She had no desire to be dragged in front of the tribunal to be punished for brawling in the streets. As instigator of the ruckus, she would be sure to be punished most harshly of all. If the captain was in a foul mood that day, she could even be deprived of her commission and sent home in disgrace.

  She had joined the Musketeers to bring honor to Gerard’s name, not to drag it through the gutters. Her blistered heels complaining at every step, she followed the others through the darkening streets, staying in the shadows as much as possible and keeping a wary eye out for any guards who might still be on the prowl.

  The blond Muskeeter lodged in a fine house not three streets away from her own. Sophie started to relax a little now that she was in familiar territory, and not lost in the dark in some back alley in an unidentifiable part of Paris.

  Like a trio of thieves, they crept in the front door as quietly as possible and dashed up the stairs to the blond Musketeer’s apartments on the second floor.

  The blond Musketeer sank into a comfortable chair with a sigh of relief and motioned his visitors to do likewise. “God in heaven but my feet are killing me in those damned boots,” he said, unlacing his boots and tossing them into a corner. He wiggled his toes with relief. His feet, Sophie noticed, were surprisingly small and dainty for such a tall man.

  She resisted the temptation to do likewise. “Gerard Delamanse, at your service, Sirs,” she said, as she sank into a chair in her turn. “And I hope I don’t have to run like that again for a while.”

  The blond Musketeer gave her a lazy salute from the depths of his chair. “William Ruthgard at yours.”

  The thief pulled a bottle of wine out from under his shirt with a flourish. He grabbed a couple of glasses off the sideboard and poured a generous measure into each, before tilting the bottle to his own lips, taking a long drink and wiping his mouth clean again with the back of his hand. “Since we are in a formal mood, let me introduce myself to you both,” he said, and he aimed a mocking bow in their general direction. “I am JeanPaul Metin, at your service. To your health, gentlemen.”

  Sophie glugged a mouthful of the rich, warm wine. It trickled down her dry throat like manna from heaven. “You carried this all the way in your shirt without breaking it?”

  The thief tilted the bottle to his lips again, smacking his lips with satisfaction. “It slowed me down some, but it was worth it. The very best Rhenish wine doesn’t come my way every day.”

  The blond Musketeer swirled the wine around his mouth and then shook his head. “Not the very best, but a damn good bottle, anyway. How did you manage to swipe it when I wasn’t looking?”

  The thief laughed as he flexed his fingers. “Years of practice and a good eye.”

  She was drinking stolen wine, Sophie thought with an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of her belly. The landlord had been duly punished for his callousness by having his tavern destroyed in a brawl. Drinking his wine without paying for it was adding insult to injury. Still, she was very thirsty and the wine was too good to waste. She would pay him for it on the morrow, she decided, as she drank another mouthful.

  A few more mouthfuls and Sophie started to feel lightheaded and bone weary to boot. She closed her eyes briefly for a moment, and then shook herself awake again with a start. She did not dare fall asleep in company. She must concentrate on staying awake. Her eyes focused on the blond Musketeer’s face. Something was awry – she couldn’t put her finger on exactly what it was.

  The blond Musketeer grew uncomfortable under her scrutiny. “What are you staring at?” His voice was brusque and less than friendly.

  Sophie had finally worked out what had been bothering her. “Your moustache is coming loose,” she said, without thinking of what she was saying. “You need to glue it on again.”

  The blond Musketeer’s face turned bright red. He rose half upright in his chair and laid his hand on the hilt of his sword. “Just what are you implying?”

  The thief laughed. “She’s right, you know. You need better glue that doesn’t lose its grip when you sweat. Personally I find that false moustaches are seldom worth the effort. They’re damnably itchy, and it’s so hard to get them looking natural. It’s easier to pretend that you shave religiously every night and morning.”

  The blond Musketeer froze, half in and half out of his chair, looking completely nonplussed.

  Sophie barely heard past his first few words before she leapt up in horror in her turn. “She? You called me “she”?”

  The thief put his hands in the air, palms out, in a gesture of conciliation. “Just a guess. Based on the simple observation that your breast wrappings have come a little loose, and you don’t see many men on the streets with a chest like yours.”

  Sophie glanced down at her chest. Sure, her wrappings had come a little loose in their wild scramble across the rooftops and over walls, but not unduly so. The faint jiggle of her breasts can hardly have been noticeable, especially not in the dark. How had this mere stranger guessed her secret so easily?

  And why was the blond Musketeer wearing a false moustache?

  Sophie and the blond Musketeer looked at each other, and then at the thief, in burgeoning understanding.

  Sophie was the first to speak. “You’re a woman,” she said looking at the blonde Musketeer. “That’s why you’re wearing a false mustache.” She turned next to the thief. “And so are you.”

  Chapter 4

  The thief drained the bottle dry and put it down by her side with a look of regret on her face. “Guilty as charged. Do you have another bottle of wine or shall I have to make do with ale for the rest of the night?”

  The blond Musketeer looked utterly bemused. She was staring straight at Sophie, not seeming able to accept what was in front of her. “That’s why you attacked that lout in the tavern, isn’t it? Because you’re a woman, too?”

  Sophie was still reeling from the shock of finding two Musketeers with the same secret that had weighed her down for so many weeks. She had companions now – two of them. She had someone to talk to, to share her life with, someone who would understand, and who would never give her secrets away. She was not alone any more. She wanted to shout out loud with the joy of it. “I don’t like bullies that pick on people who can’t fight back,” she said. “He needed to be taught a lesson.”

  “I wondered at the time what had possessed you to fight him. No man would have gone to the serving girl’s aid.” The blonde Musketeer’s voice was laced with bitterness. “Whatever pretty words they may w
hisper in your ear, men are all alike in their selfish, stupid, pig-headed ways. They all believe that women are there only to be used, not protected.”

  “I owe you my thanks for coming to fight by my side. I thought I was done for.”

  “I couldn’t let you fight that battle on your own. It was a battle that all women should fight against the men that abuse and oppress their sex.”

  A snort of muffled laughter came from the other side of the room where the thief had given up waiting for an answer to her request for more wine and was rifling through the sideboard in a search for something else to drink. “Pah. All women indeed. Don’t feed me any of that codswallop or I’ll puke.”

  The blonde Musketeer growled. “Trust a dirty little gutter rat not to know the meaning of morality or respectability or human decency. You may as well stay a man and be done with it. You act just like men do.”

  The thief turned around to glare back at her. “Street rats can’t afford morals. You can take your morality and shove it up your arse for all I care.”

  Sophie spoke up quickly, trying to distract their attention away from their quarrel. She wanted them to be sisters and work together, not to snarl and spit at each other like fighting cocks. “How did you guess our sex?”

  The thief was still not mollified. She looked pointedly at the blonde Musketeer as she spoke. “A life on the street teaches to look beyond how people seem on the outside. If you don’t learn that lesson quickly, you’re dead.”

  Surely she could have seen through them on the instant. No one else had so much as suspected her disguise for weeks. “When did you realize that we were women?”

  “As soon as you burst into the storeroom and rudely disturbed my booty-gathering,” the thief said, her back turned to them again. “You could have knocked me down with a feather when I saw the pair of you evidently with the same idea as I had – to become a Musketeer. I thought I was the only woman daft enough to try it, not to mention smart enough to carry it off.”

  Sophie knew just what that felt like. She could hardly conceive that there were three of them in the same boat. She had to wonder if there were any more of them hidden away in different regiments – women passing themselves off as men, just like the three of them.

  “It’s the only reason I stuck with you both,” the thief continued, her head deep in a cupboard. “If you’d been men, I would’ve ditched you three times over and left you to be taken up in irons by the guard without a qualm. As it was, I figured you two could do with a helping hand.

  “Ah ha, success.” She turned around again, a fresh bottle of wine in her hand. “Come gentleman, shall we make our introductions again?” she said, as she poured them all another generous measure. “Let me start. May I introduce myself not as JeanPaul Metin but as Miriame Dardagny, born and raised in the back alleys of Paris, lately a pickpocket, recently turned Musketeer in the hopes of making my fortune with rather less risk to my neck.”

  The blonde Musketeer stretched out her legs in front of her. “Courtney Ruthgard at your service. I have a cousin named William of around my age.” She wrinkled her nose. “He is a sweet-natured simpleton who grows tulips in Holland and hasn’t a martial bone in his body – he is one of the few men in the world who is worth the food he eats. I borrowed his name to become a Musketeer and avenge the wrong that one of them did to me and my family. God willing, he will sleep with the worms before too much longer and I shall sleep easy in my bed again.”

  “Sophie Delamanse. My twin brother, Gerard, was a Musketeer before he died of the plague – the plague that I brought into the house. I loved him dearly and would have given my life for his, but I was the cause of his death. I decided to take his place, and win in his name the honor that should have been his.”

  The three of them sat in silence for a while, drinking their wine and looking at each other in bemusement. Sophie did not know what to say to the other two. She had trained herself for so long to act and think like a man that she did not know how to be a woman again.

  Finally she dared to do what she had been longing to do for hours. She reached under her shirt and pulled free the wrappings that bound her chest, sighing with pleasure as her breasts swung free. “Ah, that feels so good. I never dreamed how uncomfortable men’s clothes could be until I had to wear them myself.”

  At her cue, Courtney pulled off the tattered remains of her moustache, tossed her hat aside and ran her hands through the strawberry blonde hair that fell straight to her shoulders. “I detest wearing hats, but I look impossibly feminine without mine.” Her usually somber face relaxed into a grin. “I think I’ll forgo the moustache in future though. I would hate to have it fall off in my dinner. How shockingly disreputable that would be.”

  Miriame perched comfortably on the arm of a chair. “Breeches are far more practical than dresses when you live on the street. I don’t know that I’ve ever worn a dress in my life – certainly not that I can remember.”

  All three of them were silent with their own thoughts. The silence was broken only by the sound of them breathing, the faint ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner and the night noises that filtered their way up through the street.

  Sophie lay back in her chair and stared at the ceiling. This discovery had changed everything. “So what now?”

  Miriame rested her boots on the low table in front of her. “We have a drink, we rest our feet and then Sophie and I make our way home again once the guards have given up the chase.”

  “That is not what I meant.”

  Miriame looked genuinely confused. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, we can hardly go on pretending that we don’t know each other’s deep, dark secret, can we? So, what do we do about it?”

  Courtney nodded. “I see what you mean.”

  Miriame raised her glass. “You keep my secret close and I’ll keep yours to my dying day. Either of you betray me by so much as an incautious word, and I throw the pair of you to the wolves. Deal?”

  “And that’s all?”

  “What more do you want?”

  Sophie shook her head at Miriame’s obtuseness. “We could make each other’s lives far easier. Alone as we are now, we risk attracting unwanted attention from those who may want to befriend us. If we succeed in keeping our fellows at a safe distance, we may garner suspicion because of our solitary ways. Alone, we are vulnerable. Together, we can form a barrier against the rest of the world that our enemies will not be able to break.”

  Miriame raised her glass in a cynical salute. “All for one and one for all and all that stuff? How quaint.”

  Sophie glared at her. “I’m serious.”

  Miriame looked suspiciously at the wine in the bottom of her glass. “Why? What do you get out of this?”

  Sophie thought of the lonely nights she had spent in her attic room, longing for companionship. She would not let this chance slip out of her hands without a fight. “How long can you be a Musketeer and yet not be one?” she asked. “How long can you survive surrounded by people you cannot afford to trust or confide in?”

  Miriame crossed her arms across her chest in a defensive gesture. “All my life so far.”

  Sophie could not imagine such solitude. She had always had Gerard to love her and listen to her. She hated to feel so alone. “That is no way to live. It is existence, not life. Are you not sick of it? Don’t you ever long to have a friend to talk to?”

  “How long will it take before your fellows notice that you never go swimming with them?” Courtney chimed in. “Or that you never strip down to wash off after a hard day’s fighting? Won’t they start to think you strange? Of course, most men wash infrequently enough that they may not notice.”

  Miriame was not impressed. “Each to his own. If I don’t bother them, they won’t bother me.”

  Sophie shook her head. “You may spit and curse along with the rest of them, but you’ll never be able to piss in the corner of the courtyard like they do. Sooner or later, one way or another, they’ll f
ind you out.”

  Courtney screwed up her face in disgust. “Men are such pigs.”

  Miriame was silent for a while, her forehead furrowed in thought. “So, what do you suggest we do about it?”

  “We band together. Not just for one night, but for all time.”

  “We eat and drink together.”

  “We keep each other’s secrets.”

  “We go on duty together.”

  “We look after each other’s interests.”

  “Brothers-in-arms.”

  Miriame lifted her nearly empty glass. “Fellow Musketeers, sisters in arms, we have a deal.”

  Courtney filled their glasses to the brim one more time.

  Miriame drained her newly filled glass and lifted it to the ceiling with a whoop. “Pour me another one then, sisters, I feel a celebration coming on.”

  Sophie tilted the warm rich wine down her throat. She had two new companions, and life was good. All the three of them needed now was an adventure that tested their mettle and their fighting spirit and proved their worth to the world.

  The Comte de Guiche raised himself up on his elbow at the sound of the rustling at the door. “Henrietta,” he whispered urgently into the ear of the woman sleeping soundly beside him. “Wake up.”

  She half woke up and pulled him towards her for a kiss, her hand moving to touch him in between his legs. “Darling,” she murmured, her voice husky with sleep. “You’re insatiable, and I love you for it.”

  He could see the glow of a lighted candle through the curtains around their bed. They had dismissed all their servants the previous eve so they could be alone together. Whoever held the candle was here to spy on them and discover their loves. Whoever it was bore them no good will.

  He hugged her tightly to him. “Henrietta,” he whispered again, the knowledge of mortal danger clutching at his heart. “We have been betrayed.”