by Leda Swann
He waved them away with his huge paw. “All the flowery phrases in the world can’t tell me whether you can fight like a man or not,” he growled. “Put ‘em away again. I don’t care a toss for them, be they from the King himself.”
She tucked them carefully back into her pocket again. Mayhap she could get the name changed on them by a forger of her acquaintance, and sell them for a good profit in case of hard times ahead. No one else was to know they were worthless. She made a note to see to it in the coming days. Though better than begging or thievery, soldiering was a chancy occupation at best. She wouldn’t starve, but she’d have to use her wits to make her fortune still.
“Monsieur Savage is a fitting enough name for you, but hardly suitable for the barracks,” the squat man said. “I am Saphon Renouf, lieutenant of the company. What name are you called by?”
Miriame doffed her hat. “JeanPaul Metin at your service, Messieurs.”
Renouf took her arm in his and marched off with her across the yard. “Welcome to the barracks, Metin, my friend. Come, let me show you around.”
JeanPaul Metin blinked his eyes slowly, feeling as though he had just waked from a long and troubled dream. Phantoms had been dancing around him just out of sight, evil phantoms that had brought nothing with them but pain so great it made him, a grown man, want to weep.
Thank the Lord he was awake now. That was the last time he would eat toasted cheese before going to bed. The bad dreams it gave him weren’t worth it. Besides, cheese was reputed to make a man melancholic and give him worms.
He reached out with one arm, feeling blindly for the woman who had shared his bed for the past delicious month. He had never known such pleasure could exist as she had shown him. The touch of her soft, red mouth on his body would more than make up for all his bad dreams. He could not feel her beside him. “Francine?” he asked, puzzled. She was as indolent as a pampered cat and never ever got out of bed before he did in the morning.
The phantoms returned when he moved, sending flashes of fiery pain through his entire body. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut, willing the tears of anguish not to fall. He would not want her to see him weep like a babe.
“There ain’t no Francine here,” a rough voice came from somewhere to the side. “Just me.”
Her voice was coarse and uncultured, not like the pretty softness of his Francine’s sweet speech. From somewhere deep inside him, away from the pain, he found the strength to ask. “Who are you?”
“Louise, Monsieur, if it please you.”
“Where’s Francine? What have you done with Francine?”
“I don’t know no Francine, Monsieur.”
He heard a rustle of her skirts as she moved away. He was suddenly filled with an unreasoning panic that she would leave and he would be left alone with his phantoms again. “Where are you going? Don’t leave me.”
“I’m just going to fetch the doctor, Monsieur. Madame told me as I had to fetch the doctor if ever you woke up again, though she didn’t think it likely.”
“The doctor? Have I been sick?” That would explain the pain he still felt, even though he was awake now. “Have I been poisoned? Where is Francine?”
“Not sick, hurt bad. We all thought you was a-going to die. We already had the sexton bespoke to bury you in the churchyard and all.”
His mind was struggling through the fog, but he could make no sense either of her words or of his jumbled memories. “What happened to me?”
“Don’t rightly know, Monsieur. Mebbe the doctor can tell you. He’ll be here in a trice.” With a final rustle of her skirts she was gone.
Metin lay awake for a bit after she had gone. He tried to move again, to sit up and look around him at least for his Francine, but the phantoms were still too watchful. They circled around him warily, ready to deliver a jolt of pain to his body when he moved so much as a single muscle. He lay as still as he could in the hopes they would weary of their game and leave him be.
By the time the doctor had climbed up the stairs, wheezing heavily in his tight waistcoat, Metin had fallen asleep once more.
When he woke again it was daylight. The sun streamed in the open window, taking the chill off the autumn day. The brightness made his eyes water and he blinked several times and turned his head away from the light.
“Ah, you’re awake, I see,” a gruff voice came from the other side of the room. “I was beginning to wonder if the maid had been telling stories.”
It was not Francine’s voice this time either, but the voice of a man. “Where’s Francine?”
“Francine?” The gruff voice sounded puzzled. “Who is this Francine you speak of?”
He opened his eyes just a crack and peered around with growing puzzlement. None of his surroundings were in the least bit familiar. The chamber he was lying in even smelled strange – like heavy stone and damp wood and rat droppings. He missed the scent of fresh tilled earth and green fields that he was used to. “Where am I?”
“You’re at the Bull and Goose in Fauborg Lane.”
“Fauborg Lane?” He’d never heard of such a place.
“In Paris.”
He shook his head, wincing at the pain that the slightest movement gave him. The last thing he could remember was drifting off to sleep, with the delectable Francine clasped in his arms, back in her chateau in the south of France where she had been in exile from the court for displeasing the King. How could he suddenly have been transported half the breadth of the country? “What am I doing in Paris?”
“I was rather hoping you could tell me that.”
He went to sit up, but the pain in his chest made him gasp, and he lay back down on his pillows once more. “What happened to me?” he said, when he could finally control his voice for long enough to speak. “Why does my head hurt so much? And my chest?”
“You are lucky to be alive at all. You have a nasty wound just by your heart that would have made an end of most other men. An inch further to the side, and no one could have saved you.”
He touched his hand to his chest, encountering thick layers of wrappings instead of the skin he expected to find. “Wounded,” he said in wonderment. How and when had this happened? He could remember nothing of it.
“Indeed you were,” broke in a female voice.
He turned his head a little to see a buxom woman in a voluminous apron bring a tray in through the door. He sniffed at the good meaty smells wafting through his chamber and his stomach rumbled. His belly was growling as if he hadn't eaten for a week.
She set the tray down on the bed with a thump, seated herself next to it, and held a spoonful of beef broth to his lips. “We all thought you was on your way to Heaven,” she said, as she slipped the spoon into his mouth. “I’d never seen a man wounded as bad as you were that lived to tell the tale. For all that, I couldn’t leave you a-lying in the street waiting to die, so I hoisted you up and brought you here, put you in this here chamber and looked after you as if you were my own son, and all the while thinking you were a-going to die and none but God in Heaven to recompense me for the trouble I’ve taken over you and the expense I’ve been to to see you right.
“I’ve had the doctor around every day, so that I have, and a maid to sit with you to see you didn’t do a mischief to yourself, and here you are better again.” She crossed herself piously with the spoon still in her hand. “I’m right glad to see you on the mend again, Monsieur. Sure as there are angels in Heaven, you and your pretty face won’t forget a poor woman who’s gone without herself in order to bring you back to health again.”
He swallowed down the three or four mouthfuls she fed him as she talked before turning his head away. Hungry as he was, his stomach felt too delicate for even such light fare as weak broth. “How long have I been here?”
“Five days ago you was brought in, looking like you needed an undertaker more than a doctor. Still, as I thought to myself, where there’s breath, there’s hope, and I sent for the doctor anyways, and lucky for you, Monsieur, that I d
id.”
Five days he had been lying insensible in a ramshackle inn in the middle of Paris after someone had tried to murder him? He lay back on the lumpy bolster. It was all too much for him to take in while he was still so weak. “I thank you for your care of me,” he said as he shut his eyes and let his mind fade into blessed darkness. “I will make sure you are fairly recompensed for the trouble you have been to.”
He would attend to the mystery of his wounding and his whereabouts some other time. He hurt all over, so badly that he could not turn his mind to aught. He had not even the strength to ask after Francine again. He needed sleep now, more than anything.
Miriame liked her new life in the barracks. What, after all, was there not to like about it? She was being paid a small fortune to fight for the King, so fight for him she would, with all her heart, and trust in him to help her make her fortune.
With the ready money in her pocket she had taken from the dying man, she got herself a tiny attic room close to the barracks and as far away from her old haunts as she could get. She doubted that her old acquaintances would recognize her now, dressed in the uniform of a King’s Musketeer, but she wouldn’t take the chance. Her old life was gone – she wanted nothing and nobody to remind her of it ever again.
Her new comrades had sniffed at the poverty of her room, but she had dismissed them with a rude gesture. To her, her little attic room was a palace. It kept her warm and dry all winter long – and it was hers and hers alone. No one else could set foot in it without her permission. How she treasured the privacy her tiny chamber gave her.
Renouf, true to his word, had taught her how to fight like a gentleman. She didn’t think much of a gentleman’s way of fighting – it was more like dancing than the rough and tumble brutality she was used to – but she learned it quickly all the same. Soon she could handle the long sword with passable proficiency. She had to learn quickly – Renouf never again turned his back on her until they had put down their weapons and called a truce.
In hand-to-hand combat she could teach Renouf a thing or two in her turn. She had not grown up on the streets for nothing. Her proficiency with a knife had saved her neck more than once before. She knew every dirty trick there was to get the better of your opponent, and she practiced them on Renouf until they were an equal match – his squat strength matched against her agility and speed.
Best of all, she drew a regular pay for her efforts. With satisfaction she watched the pile of gold and silver coins that she hid behind a loose brick in the wall of her attic room mount up. She would take out her pile every evening and count it over and over again.
The pile was growing, to be sure, but too slowly still for her liking. Who knows how long she would be able to remain a Musketeer? She might get ill, or worse, hurt. Doctors cost plenty, and what if she had to spend all of her hoarded savings on a cure, and then starved to death on the streets afterwards?
At the thought of going back to living on the streets again, perpetually cold and hungry, she redoubled her efforts to save her money, volunteering for every unpleasant or dangerous duty that would earn her a few extra sous.
To keep her hoard growing, she pilfered her food while she could, unwilling to pay for it while she had two good hands and a quick eye. The time would come only too soon when she could no longer steal what she needed. Then and only then would she break into her ever-growing store of coins and buy what she must.
Even so, for the sake of comradeship she could not always be saving her money. Once in a while Renouf dragged her off to the local tavern and they sat together drinking ale until the early hours. Miriame always tried to pay for these excursions by picking the pocket of some of the other patrons there. The Cardinal’s guards were her favorite targets. There was no love lost between the King’s guards and the Cardinal’s. She felt an almost righteous pleasure in robbing them of their pay and spending it for them on good ale for her and her comrades.
Neither did the innkeepers always get off free. She was honest enough in those taverns that treated her right, didn't water the beer or serve her week old rabbit and swear blind that it was fresh-killed beef. But inns that shortchanged her would find their cellars a bottle or two of good wine short, or find their storerooms not quite so full of onions and hams as they had thought.
One night, in her least-favored tavern, she excused herself from the table where she had been drinking with a group of her fellows on the pretense of needing to relieve herself, and took advantage of a sudden uproar in the tavern to sneak unnoticed into the storeroom.
She hated this innkeeper and positively enjoyed stealing from him. Not only did he water his beer, he also treated his maidservant like a slave and she was sure that he beat his little daughter, a pretty wee thing of six or seven years. Miriame had more than once caught sight of her tear-stained face peeking round a corner, but whenever she had beckoned her to come closer, the little mite had disappeared again.
She was stuffing a couple of good Spanish onions into her boots and thinking about how she would like to have the innkeeper’s daughter live with her instead, when the door suddenly sprang open and two Musketeers almost fell over themselves in their haste to get inside and bar the door again.
Miriame straightened up with a start. There was something definitely odd about these Musketeers. She blinked, shook her head, and blinked again, hardly able to believe her eyes. It wasn’t just the extra roundness of their hips, their lean shoulders or their smooth cheeks. Such a combination was possible in a man, though hardly usual. It was their eyes, the watchful, wary look in their eyes, that gave their secret away. She knew that look only too well. There’d been a few other women who lived on the street as she had – she’d always been able to pick them out from the crowd. Besides, she saw that look each time she caught a glimpse of her own face.
The onions dropped from her hand, unnoticed. She was so stunned and surprised that either of them could have knocked her over with a feather and she could not have so much as stretched out a hand to save herself.
She swallowed the words that were about to burst from her throat, turning them instead into a strangled gulp.
By God, she’d thought she was the only woman with enough daring to join up as a soldier. It seems she was mistaken. There were at least two others with as much courage as ever she had.
She stared at them out of the corner of her eye, taking in their appearance without seeming to look at them. They were done up like men, right enough. The tall, blonde one even had a moustache glued slightly crookedly on her upper lip. Musketeers though they were, they were women, and, once she had recovered from her surprise, she realized that they were evidently in trouble.
With a sigh of annoyance she picked up the onions and stuffed them into her jacket pocket, tucked a bottle of wine into her shirt, grabbed her sword and started to get to her feet. Had they been men, she would have left them to their own devices with perfect indifference, but once she had realized they were women, she could not stand back and let them fight through their troubles alone. If women did not protect each other, men would not do it for them. Three of them would be enough to stand against the whole tavern full of soldiers, if necessary.
Besides, she was ready to leave now. She’d find it easier going fighting her way out of the room with another Musketeer each side of her than she would on her own.
She wasn’t quite quick enough for their liking.
The blonde one poked her in the chest with her sword. “Drop the wine, thief, and give us a hand.” She turned away again, muttering ‘gutter-rat’ under her breath in a disgusted tone.
Much as she disliked being called a gutter-rat, Miriame was always very obliging when she had the point of a sword aimed at her heart. She took the wine out of her jacket, dropped it on the stone floor with a smash, and stood up groaning. “Do I have to?”
The looks on their faces were answer enough.
They turned to the door again and quick as a flash Miriame swiped another bottle of wine and tucked
it inside her shirt. She was not leaving without the booty she had come for. Indeed, she’d probably have holed up in there and waited until the uproar had died down if she hadn’t noticed that the shorter Musketeer was breathing heavily and holding up her sword arm as if it were weighted with lead.
She’d get them back for that gutter rat comment though. No one, but no one, called her a gutter rat and got away with it. She had scrabbled her way out of the muck with all her teeth and claws. No chance remark from a stranger was going to put her back there.
In the time it had taken Miriame to steal a couple of onions, the uproar in the tavern had exploded into a full-scale riot. Her companions had evidently riled a few of the Cardinal’s guards good and proper. A roar of rage greeted their return, and a group of soldiers came after them with swords raised high and eyes bulging with fury.
With some effort, they fought their way through the crowds and out through the kitchen when the stamping of hooves and the sounds of the bugle announced the arrival of the guard to quell the riot.
Damn the fighting – she had no wish to be caught by the guards. Her years spent as a thief had made her more leery of being caught than most.
She raced towards the back door out of habit rather than fear. The guards were easy enough to escape – their horses could not climb stone walls or scurry over rooftops as she could. If you kept off the wide roadways where the horses had room to canter and maneuver and hem you in, you were safe from them.
In the street outside she stopped for a moment to plan the easiest escape route. Her two comrades from the tavern were beside her still, their eyes wide and panting with fear.
“Where to now?” one of them asked breathlessly.
They both turned their heads towards Miriame expectantly. She grinned to herself. She wouldn’t leave the two poor fools to the mercies of the guards, but she wouldn’t let them off freely either. Now was the time to get them back for calling her a gutter rat.
