1630s PARIS - House of Bonacieux - She walked the covered chamber pot out-of-doors. It was like her husband to fall ill just as an important order was about to come due. She was no physician, but after years of tending to him at such times she had come to understand that with the anxiety of pleasing his most important clients would come an imbalance in his humours, and he would need to take to his bed, and she, to nurse him-and to find herself out-of-doors late at night, emptying the pot's foul contents before the scent and look of such things took her health as well.
Once free of the house and its current air of both sick and worry over the large order due two days hence, despite the late hour she found herself unwilling to immediately return. She walked as slow as she pleased over toward the well to rinse the now-emptied chamber pot.
"Two o' the clock and all's well!" she heard the local crier report, far off into the distant night. She was passing by the large tree near the well, when a dark figure lurched out of the shadows toward her.
She had no time to react beyond being startled.
"Is this the House of Bonacieux the Draper?" the man offered her, no greeting, no introduction, no 'pardon, madame'. She could easily make-out his sheathed sword at his side.
"It is," Constance replied, her words tight, her trust of this sudden arrival uncertain.
His eyes might have narrowed, the moonlight made such observations uncertain. "And you are?"
There was no reason she ought answer him, and yet she did. "Madame Bonacieux."
"Excellent," he declared, but more brusque than satisfied. "I must demand you come with me. A man's life depends on it."
"Your name?" she asked, overwhelmed by both his unexpected appearance and his desperate claim upon her person.
"I am Athos," he said, "of the King's Musketeers."
And, as if in deference to him, the moonlight flashed upon the leather insignia over his upper arm, confirming his identity.
There was little sense behind her following this Musketeer, and yet she did just that. He wound his way along alleys and turnings she was utterly unfamiliar with, and in moments they were in a section of Paris wholly unknown to her. She could not have returned home. She had lost any sense of in which direction it might lay.
It was a relatively lively handful of streets, even this far into the night. She noticed that in addition to the Musketeer having found her something to use as a hood and cloak, whenever he did have to walk near a torch or candle-lit window, he angled the large brim of his hat just so, to render the features of his face in shadow.
One moment he was walking in front of her, then he was gone, as though he had disappeared into the darkness. She did not have time to gasp at this unsettling discovery, or fear herself lost, before she felt herself being drawn into an unseen doorway and into a low-ceilinged back room of a home or inn or-she dared not imagine it-whorehouse.
"Madame," he said to her, "your patient."
Before her-in candlelight so dim as to be little more than moonglow-were two men, one, slumped into a chair as though asleep, short pistol laid upon his lap. The other, laid out along the length of a table as though already prepared for his wake.
A woman-a working woman-was also present, mopping at the brow of the near-corpse. She looked up from her work when this Athos arrived, and at a dismissal nod of his head, left them.
But it was not this man's brow that needed attention. His inner thigh was a-swim in blood that even the dark room could not leech of its red.
"I cannot do this," she said, turning her face away from the unsettling sight.
"A draper's wife, and you do not sew?" His voice was incredulous. And more-she thought-than a little coming-on desperate.
"I could sew for the Queen Herself," Constance assured him. "But I have never sewn flesh. You say you are a King's Musketeer-why do you not do it?"
"Because…I am drunk. Much too drunk to hold something small as a needle steady."
"And you can find no one else?" she questioned him. "What of your garrison? Your fellow soldiers? Have you no barracks physician?"
He looked at her as though she ought to feel foolish for such questions.
"You cannot ask anyone else," she intuited. "There is some…irregularity here that you do not wish discovered." She had not meant to, but had found herself slowly gravitating toward the table holding the injured, unconscious man. She noticed a rosary was wrapped about his fist, beads still between his fingertips.
"Flesh is not so different from cloth," this Athos told her. "I can talk you through it-it is only your hands I need." He had a needle, heating its tip over a flame, and with his other gloved hand he extended a skein of thread to her.
"Silk!" she exclaimed, upon feeling it when she took it from him. "Very elegant."
"It seems to heal better."
She did not know that. But then, there were many such things in this room-in this part of Paris-about which she knew very little.
"And him-does he need medical attention as well?" she acknowledged the seated, sleeping man-presumably also a Musketeer-and the bruising now visibly upon his swollen face.
"His lumps will heal without your help," she was told. "It was only that Ar-" he cut himself off from sharing the name with her, "-my comrade would not come quietly."
"So this is a Musketeers' quarrel," she fished for more information to keep her mind off the task at hand as she picked up the waiting needle and threaded it, her practiced fingers able to do so even in the dim light.
"No," she was told, and nothing further.
Before she could fully reach the table, and see the man's face in the candlelight, Athos had moved to the head of it and deposited his own hat over the injured man's face.
"So it is best I do not even know who I am to mend?"
"It is best you recall as little of this night as possible," Athos advised her.
She looked down to the injury on the man's inner thigh. It was a serious cut, and one that seemed highly unlikely to come about in a usual combat situation. In point of fact, it seemed much more like the area a jealous husband might choose to aim for when dueling with the man cuckolding him.
"But you gave me your name," she reminded him, wishing someone had not had the foresight to remove the injured man's underclothes, and that she could, instead, be stitching up this gash through the gash in muslin cloth rather than being confronted with the faceless body of a trouserless man, her hands and face necessarily far too close to just those parts some jealous lover had attempted to separate from him.
"It did not seem you were likely to follow me if I hadn't," Athos confessed.
"You are right, Monsieur. I am not a reckless person."
"No. I am sure you are not," he agreed. "Leave plenty of thread to tie off once you are done."
She felt her hands shaking as she pierced flesh with the heated needle. Perhaps she would do no better a job of it than this drunken Musketeer.
"You are doing fine," she heard him tell her, where he watched over her work. "Just remember to breathe. Take your time, and you'll be back home, able to forget us, to forget all this."
"Well," she never was good at holding in a thought, "that does seem unlikely."
She did not look up, but in response to her tone, the Musketeer Athos' mouth relaxed for a moment into the turn-up of a wry smile.
...end...