by Leda Swann
She attacked him with a renewed fury, concentrating all her attention in the movement of his body, seeking for hints of his next movement, those tiny clues that would give her the advantage in the attack.
One of the onlookers called out an encouragement. Lamotte unwisely turned on his heel to acknowledge the favor with a tip of his hat.
In an instant Sophie was on him, drawing blood from the fleshy upper part of his arm with a lucky hit.
He cursed at the sight of the blood staining his jacket and his levity fled on the instant. Sophie quaked in her borrowed boots at the new determination on his face. Even the rowdy onlookers fell silent, sensing that the fun was now over.
Thrust after fatal thrust he aimed at her, steadily driving her back against the wall of the courtyard, until she could retreat no further.
He lunged again.
Sword raised to parry his blow, she tripped and fell sprawling on her back in the dirt. The force of the impact knocked her weapon out of her hand, out of her reach, into the mud.
He stood above her blocking the sunlight, his sword at her throat. She stared up at him, hatred in her heart, willing him to slit open her gorge with his blade and end her struggle.
His eyes were the steely gray of ice in winter. She felt the chill of descending death. “Take back your words.”
She spat in his direction, her spittle only reaching halfway up his boots before running slowly down. She stared at its slow journey, knowing that it was the last thing she would ever see.
The tip of the sword slowly lifted from her throat. She dragged her eyes away from Lamotte’s boot and watched him re-sheathe his weapon by his side.
She had thought to be with Gerard in paradise by now. He had cheated her of death.
He reached down towards her and offered her his hand, but she scrambled to her feet again, unaided. “Why will you not kill me?”
He was looking at her in puzzlement, as if he saw her and yet didn’t see her. “You’re not worth dirtying my blade on,” he said at last. “You’ve forgotten everything the Captain and I ever taught you about fighting. Come back and insult me again when you are worth clashing swords with.”
Sophie watched as he limped away, shaking his head. His face was etched in her memory: her brother’s false friend and her own worst enemy. By refusing to kill her, he had insulted her to the death. Next time they met, she would not rest until she had killed him.
She retrieved her sword from the ground, wiping it clean on her jerkin before returning it to her side. He had escaped her vengeance today, but no matter. He would not find her so unprepared another day.
A burly man with shoulders as wide as the back end of an ox detached himself from the onlookers. “Delamanse, my lad,” he said, slapping her so hard on the back that Sophie nearly toppled over with the unexpected force of it. “I’m glad to see you back in my regiment, for all you are so thin and pale and as cack-handed with a sword as a girl. A regimen of hard training with your betters will have you fighting like a man again and a dozen pints of port drunk of an evening with your fellows will put the color back in your cheeks.”
He heaved a huge sigh. “Ah, I know it’s a good thing to have peace in Paris, but I miss the good old days of rebellion in the streets when a man could carve up a dozen rebellious Frondeurs before breakfast just to work up a hearty appetite.”
D’Artagnan, the Captain of the Musketeers, Sophie groaned to herself, as she doffed her hat and bowed to her superior. Covered in mud and sweat and smarting from the utter humiliation of an ignominious defeat was not the way she had dreamed of meeting him.
Ricard Lamotte bowed painfully to his Monarch as he took the folded paper from the desk. He glanced at the direction. Yet another missive for Madame Henrietta Anne, the Duchesse D’Orleans.
He knew the way to her apartments with his eyes closed. A brief knock at the door had the Duchesse’s pretty red-haired maid opening it for him. He handed her the letter. “For your mistress.”
He did not wait for a reply. He knew of old that the Duchesse D’Orleans had no particular love for her brother-in-law, King Louis XIV, and would give any messenger from him curses in place of gold coins for his efforts.
How he longed to be back on active duty on the front – any front - instead of acting as pander to the King.
He limped slowly back to his station, his side aching abominably as he moved and a trickle of blood seeping through his shirt. He hoped the edges of his wound had still held together; he had no desire to be sewn up again as if he were made of leather rather than of flesh and blood that felt every movement of the needle that pierced his side. He had been foolish to pick a fight with Gerard when he was still so lamed, but such provocation as Gerard had offered him could not be ignored.
The other guard sat morosely by the wall, a pint of porter in his hand. He tipped his jug by way of a greeting, but didn’t speak.
How Ricard missed Gerard’s light heart and easy tongue that had made even the coldest, wettest, longest, and most miserable night of guard duty bearable.
Gerard had returned, but he was not Gerard any longer. It was as if the body of Gerard had remained, but his soul had been replaced with that of a stranger – a stranger who bore a deep grudge against him.
He had read the hate in his old friend’s eyes and it had shaken him to his soul. The cause was a mystery to him – an inexplicable twist of fate. He could only think that Gerard’s sickness had affected his reasoning along with his strength and skill with a sword.
He shrugged his shoulders, wincing where Gerard’s blade had cut deep into his flesh. Another scar to add to his rapidly growing collection. He still could not believe that Gerard had deliberately wounded him.
Worse still, he believed that Gerard would have killed him if he could. He had no idea why – but he intended to find out as soon as he could.
In the meantime, he would have to watch his back with care. There was none so treacherous, or so much to be feared, as a friend who had turned against you.
Chapter 3
The days passed in a haze of exhaustion for Sophie in her new role as Musketeer of the King’s Guard. Every day she completed her allotted guard duty and then trained to the point of collapse, and early each evening she passed out on her bed as soon as she lay her head on the prickly straw of the mattress. Now she understood only too well why Gerard’s letters had been so few and far between when he had been in Paris and she had been waiting anxiously in the provinces for some sign from him that he was still alive and well. He had had no time to write them.
Even if he had had the time to write to her, he would have had no strength to lift the quill to the paper. She surprised herself each morning that she could still move the aching, protesting muscles of her body. She surprised herself even more that she had the will to roll off her bed and into her uniform. She surprised herself that she was even still alive, what with the punishment she was inflicting each day on her poor, mistreated body.
She barely noticed that her attic room in the lodging house was small and dark and pokey – nearly every second she spent in it was spent sleeping. The thin gruel her landlady provided for her meager supper was left untouched as often as not – she would eat well at the officer’s table at the barracks at midday, and come evening time she would rather sleep than eat.
Gradually she became inured to the hardships of her new life. The muscles in her arms became bigger and better defined, and they no longer ached unbearably after a long day’s practice with sword or spear. Her legs grew accustomed to the punishment of spending hour after hour on horseback, dressed in the heavy leather riding boots that were part of her uniform.
Thanks to her love of horses and hunting, she could ride better than most of her fellows already, but her skill with the sword was well behind. Her arms were simply not strong enough to fight hard for long. After a short bout of swordplay, her right arm would begin to tire and her opponent would eventually conquer her not by dint of great skill, but simply by b
attering her down through brute strength.
She watched her fellows closely as they dueled with each other. None of them were as inept as she was, though some were little better. After some weeks of watching every move they made she had to admit that of all of them, Lamotte was the most proficient with the sword. Now that he had recovered from the limp that had slowed him down, not only was he strong, but he was agile and clever.
She loved to watch her enemy fight – he was as strong as the village blacksmith back home in the Camargue and as graceful as a dancer at the same time. He could cleave a post in two with one blow from his sword in one moment, and leap as high as the acrobat from the traveling fair at whom she had marveled as a child in the next. At times, he looked as light on his feet as a butterfly in flight, while at other times his legs anchored him to the ground more solidly than a hundred year old oak tree.
When he took off his jacket and pushed his sleeves up his arms, the bronzed muscles of his bare arms rippled in the sunshine as he parried and thrust with an ease and grace that made her heart pound in her breast and her breathing quicken. Half-dressed as he was, he looked like a warrior of old, a wild and cunning Berserker, whom none could stand against and live.
She wondered anew at her foolishness at picking a fight with him on the day she arrived. Had he not been hurt already, she would have suffered a far more ignominious defeat than she had dreamed was possible. None of the others came close to his skill. None could match him for speed, and he could disarm an opponent who was twice as large and heavy as he was with a clever feint and twist of his blade.
She would learn from him, she decided one day, as she stood outside the fencing ring watching him demolish an entire regiment of men, one after the other. She needed to learn what he could teach her. She would never outclass her enemies in strength, so she would have to outfox them with her agility and her cunning.
She would ask Count Lamotte to help her. Putting herself in his way was risky, but she had little to lose and much to gain from him. If she was to outshine her peers, she must learn from the best – and Lamotte was indisputably the best.
Besides, she needed to learn all his tricks so that she could turn them against him when next they fought. She liked the idea of learning all that he could teach her until she could defeat him with his own weapons. It carried a sense of poetic justice.
As each day passed, she had grown more and more confident in her role as Gerard, and less fearful that her masquerade would be discovered. Even Lamotte, who had been her brother’s closest companion, had not discovered that she was an imposter. She was accepted by the entire regiment as Gerard. She no longer even thought about her sex much herself, except when she bound her breasts up tightly in the morning and unbound them again in the evening.
She was in no danger from Lamotte. She would learn everything she could learn from her enemy and, God willing, she would eventually use her hard-won knowledge to defeat her teacher. Then would her brother be avenged on his false friend and his ghost would sleep easier in the grave.
Lamotte noticed immediately when Gerard started to watch him practice his swordplay once more. However early he was at the fencing ring to practice his thrusts and feints, Gerard was there before him, waiting with hungry eyes watching his every move, just as he had when the boy had first arrived in Paris nearly two years ago.
This time, however, Lamotte did not rush in to offer his services as tutor to his old friend. Since the day that Gerard had tried to kill him, the two of them had more or less studiously ignored each other.
He was biding his time – sure that if he left Gerard alone, the boy would come to him in the end. He would find out sooner or later why the lad hated him with such intensity. In the meantime, he contented himself with watching his back whenever his former friend was around.
His skill with the sword had always been the lodestone that attracted Gerard. It seemed that the magnet had lost none of its power and that the attraction was still there, despite the hatred that festered in the lad’s heart for him. He was not surprised when his old friend approached him one day after fencing practice.
Gerard looked directly at him with those blue eyes that were so clearly Gerard’s and yet not Gerard’s. “Teach me how to fight.” A demand, not a question. How like a boy he was still, with his smooth, pink cheeks and his awkward ways. He would lay a wager that Gerard still had no need for a razor to keep his chin smooth.
He grabbed his towel from where it hung on the fence and wiped the sweat off his forehead. The weather showed no signs of cooling yet and fighting in the heat was hard work. Thank the Lord that his wounds had healed well and no longer slowed him down so much. They had left his skin feeling tight and puckered down one side, but they no longer pained him except when it rained. He moved his shoulders in a circular motion, feeling the muscles stretch and pull. In time he would regain more of the flexibility he had lost. He would have to be patient. “Why should I do that?”
Gerard shrugged his shoulders and shuffled his feet in the dirt, not looking him in the eyes. “Because I need to learn, and you’re the best swordsman in the barracks.”
He drank deeply of the water from his flask and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. Gerard had used exactly those words the first time he had asked to be taught, and in exactly the same tone. There was no flattery in it – it was simply as if his skill was a matter of fact. He shook his head. He could not put his finger on why he was so uneasy in Gerard’s company, but the lad still troubled him.
“You do not want to teach me?” Gerard sounded more determined than distressed.
Maybe some lessons would give him the time he needed to unravel the mystery of Gerard’s sudden change of attitude towards him. “Come. Put up your sword.”
Gerard’s mouth dropped open. “Now?”
“Is there any better time?”
Gerard gave a tremor. “I suppose not.” He drew his sword and held it in front of him as if it were a charm against evil.
After a few minutes of cut and thrust, Lamotte tossed his sword up into the air and caught it in his left hand. He could not believe how Gerard’s skill with the sword had so utterly disappeared over the past six months. “Have you forgotten everything I ever taught you?” he asked in puzzlement, as Gerard failed to protect himself from the most simple feint.
Gerard tripped over his feet and righted himself with a curse. “I was sick. I had the plague.”
The excuses made no sense. “The plague does not affect your brain. Or your sword arm.”
Gerard was sweating heavily and beginning to tire. “It left me weakened. I am no longer as strong as I was.”
He grinned. “You were never going to be the strongman at the fair.”
Gerard did not take offense at his teasing comment. “I need to learn how to compensate for my lack of strength. That is what I want you to teach me.”
“Swordplay is not about strength. It is about speed and agility, and the ability to read the mind of your opponent so you know what thrust he will make as soon as he knows himself.”
Gerard looked as intrigued as if he had never heard him say that before – though indeed he had drummed it into the boy’s head time and time again when he had taught him before. “How can I do that?”
“Keep your eyes on your opponent. Never take them off him – even for a second, or,” he glanced pointedly at the still red scar on his upper arm, “you will find yourself stitching up a rather painful flesh wound or two.”
Gerard blushed like a girl and look slightly shamefaced.
He felt a small measure of satisfaction at Gerard’s discomfiture. The wound had hurt like the very devil, especially when the surgeon had stitched it up with his clumsy fingers. “Watch his eyes. They will give him away every time.”
They would have to go back to the basics, Lamotte decided, as Gerard stumbled once again and dropped his sword on the ground. He would start from the beginning and teach Gerard once more how to fight like a Musketeer.
/> For the next hour, he drilled Gerard unmercifully. Cut, thrust. Cut, thrust. He made Gerard practice the first simple movement over and over again until it was perfect. Then he made Gerard practice it over and over again until it was fast. Then he made Gerard practice some more until it was faster. Only when the boy had achieved pinpoint accuracy at lightening speed did he let him drop his sword on to the ground to rest.
Gerard had not uttered a word of complaint or asked to stop, though Lamotte could see that he was near to passing out from exhaustion. The plague may have changed him in many ways, but it had not altered the strength of his will or his hunger to excel. “You’ll soon learn how to fight again if you practice that hard.”
Gerard’s breath was so labored he could hardly speak. “Good.”
“I hope that you do not forget again so quickly.”
“I will not forget a single lesson ever again.”
He eyed the lad curiously. Gerard was only a handful of years younger than he was, but lately those few years had yawned like a huge, impassable gulf between them. “Why do you want to fight so badly?” Once he thought he had known, but now he was no longer sure of anything.
Gerard grabbed the flask from his hip and took a long swallow. Water dribbled over his mouth and chin as he drank. “What man doesn’t?”
“So you can safely insult me again another day?”
“Of course.”
Lamotte could not tell whether Gerard was serious or making a jest. “You would have killed me that day.”
“Yes.” There was no apology in Gerard’s tone – just a simple admission of the facts.
“Why do you hate me so much?” The question had been seriously troubling him for some time. “Why did you try to kill me?”
Gerard crouched down on his heels in the dirt and ran a dirty hand over his forehead, leaving trails of grime in the sweat. “Because you are alive.”
Of all things, he had not been expecting this. It made no sense. “Because I am alive?” he repeated stupidly. “What do you mean?”
