Sign of the Cross
By JeanTre16
Chapter 17
Egressing the Darkness
Author's Note: Egressing means to come out or emerge from concealment. It also is an astronomy term referring to an emergence of a celestial body from an eclipse or occultation.
Once behind the closed doors of their tower suite, d'Artagnan sprung into motion. Not wasting any time in the gentle treatment of their surroundings, he purposefully flung the covers off their bed. Earlier that day he had concocted his plan in the event that their relations with the king soured. In the protective husband's judgment, their host's nauseating behavior had escalated way past the effect of the lime he had eaten on the Maiden Castle. His stomach pitched at the realization that he had not been the only one premeditating maneuvers.
If what the story-telling king had told Jacqueline was true or even if he believed it to be true, d'Artagnan saw why the royal figurehead ignored his presence and incessantly waited upon hers. The Viscompte ground his teeth at the thought that the immoral British bachelor saw his wife as his equal, while he was deemed merely a pawn in the game to obtain the prize. Much to his chagrin, the coveted prize was his wife, who he currently believed was not thinking clearly. If his perceptions were right, much would depend upon him in the next few minutes. With the bed now clear of its covers, he worked on removing its linen.
"What are you doing?" Jacqueline asked, suddenly aware of her husband's strange diversion. Her mind had obviously been elsewhere. If anything, she wanted to talk, and instead, she stood there uncomprehending why her husband was ransacking their room like a wild man.
Looking up to see the questioning in her stance, he granted her an explanation. "Remember Celeste La Rue—the woman who intended to poison me, had it not been for your intervention? I believe you inferred it to be something like woman's intuition." His gaze locked with hers briefly to confirm that she was following him. Holding their disassembled bed sheets up, he emphatically tugged the fabric down the center, causing it to rip loudly. "Well, you can call this male intuition if you like. But whatever you call it, I'm telling you, your old flame, Charles Stuart, is up to something, and we're not going to be around for the surprise party."
Jacqueline's eyes and mouth opened wide. First, she was appalled at what d'Artagnan was doing to the royal palace linen. Second, she was even more incensed that he had referred to the king as her former flame. Third, she was just plain fed-up with his presumptuous behavior, which he conveniently called 'intuition.' Feeling her temper flare up, she clenched her fists and growled, "I admit that I have no fondness for his methods, but don't you think you're being a bit rash?"
Raising a brow at her pique, he delivered boorishly, "We're leaving…now!" The linen-ravager expected she might protest, but he knew if they did not leave immediately, his fate as well as hers would be sealed—his at the end of the executioner's blade and hers as the object of acquisition. He was convinced that stealing his bride was the royal's aim. As he saw it, there was no 'female' way of talking their way out of this, like he supposed Jacqueline might have preferred. The gravity of the situation called for action.
Previously inexplicable details came to light that made no sense to him back in France at the time when he had been rescued by Jacqueline and the exiled monarch from the Bastille. Alone with her that night in the cabin, lying beaten and bruised on the cot, it had been a definite low point in his life when she had asked him what he thought of her accepting Charles' marriage proposal. Inwardly, he had winced at the additional blows her words caused him. But being determined not to stand in her way of happiness, he had only cautioned her that royal marriages were rarely about love. He reasoned that they were about alliances and land acquisitions. The aching Musketeer wondered then what the royal heir had seen in her—not that d'Artagnan found her to be unworthy of such an honor. It was the Englishman's intentions he questioned. Now it dawned on him exactly what that something had been: Her suspected heritage had motivated Charles Stuart to ask her to marry him.
"Why now?" The exasperated woman held her hands up in bafflement. It was not like either of them to run at the first sight of threat. The king's offer to her had been inexcusably wrong, but he still held valid information she wanted. "What he said about my past matches everything we've discovered so far. Why would we want to leave when we're so close to having the answers to my questions?"
Still protecting Jacqueline from the whole truth of his unrealized fear, he deflected his answer, "Because I don't believe that he has any intent of being honest with the rest of it. He's using what he knows—if he knows anything at all—to manipulate us." D'Artagnan set the bedding down to face his undiscerning wife. "Don't you see it, Jacqueline? He knew about us! He knew we were married! How many other things does he know about us? That we have a price on our heads?" Scoffing in his frustration and unwilling to reveal anything further, he reminded himself that she was not the one he was upset with. The last thing he wanted to do at present was to build a wall between them. Realizing that that was exactly what was happening, had been happening since their arrival, he inadvertently returned to his flurry of activity with a final declaration, "We can't stay here."
She didn't understand it; it wasn't like him to be frightened off by a lie or speculation. Beneath her breath she accused, "You're letting your male pride, not male intuition, make your decisions" Clenching her fists angrily at her side, she spewed, "What you're saying is that you don't believe what he's told me is true. That's arrogance! Rejecting the message because you despise the deliverer. You think that he's outright deceiving me!" She spat her words out in disgust.
"What? The lauded King Charles, deceive?" he mocked. "You said it, not me." Taking the shreds of fabric, he began tying them on end to form a rope.
She squirmed uncomfortably. A twinge of guilt waved over her for not being forthright with him about everything the monarch had proposed. But if her jealous husband was acting the way he was because he did not want to receive what Charles had said about her cross, there was absolutely no way he would deal with the rest of it. "I'm not so easily fooled as you think," she snarled. But with her words, the knowledge of Charles' intentions toward her could not be shut out. Her outrage at d'Artagnan slowly eroded back to confusion toward the king, and she did not want her partner to see her falling apart. In a flux of emotion, she crossed her arms and turned away so that she would not have to face him.
In returning his attention to his business, her uneasiness escaped him. He secured the linen rope to the armoire near the window and tested its strength before looking over to see her back turned toward him. "And why would he not lie to us?" he questioned. "He's done it before, hasn't he? Or do you suddenly feel His Majesty has grown a conscience?" D'Artagnan felt that if there had been any truth in the royal's story about her cross, they would not be able to sort it out from the lies. In the soldier's book, half-truths were only fabricated in order to shadow the lies—like Cardinal Mazarin's false image of being a holy man. No, if they wanted the whole truth, he was convinced that they were not going to get it from their host.
Jacqueline opened her mouth as if she wanted to reply, but not finding the ground to contest on, she fought back the imminent tears. Her husband had spoken more truth about the coyness of the monarch than she was willing to admit. Yet, the burden of her mysterious identity proved too great at the moment and she wanted to lay it at rest. Only half-way turned about to mask her tear-swollen eyes, she gestured begrudgingly at his rigged escape scheme. "Well, I'm not going to just walk out of here…or…climb out a window."
"Oh, yes you are," he stated as he fed his line of linen toward the opening.
At this point, Jacqueline could no longer hold her composure. Shutting him out, she firmed her crossed arms and planted herself near the stripped-down bed. "And you're going to make me?" she retorted, hurt knotting within.
Looking up to see her back stubbornly turned to him, he stalled his preparation to challenge, "Don't test me." His makeshift rope was nearly completed and he was beginning to panic about her unwillingness to go.
"I don't like your attitude, Monsieur d'Artagnan," she choked out as the tears began to flow. What had begun as a disagreement about their circumstances had quickly escalated to a personal battle of wills, which Jacqueline had trouble maintaining in the midst of her struggles. She could not believe this the man in the room with her was behaving like the very overbearing, male dominating pig that she vowed never to marry. "Give me one concrete reason why I should go out that window with you right now? Besides your male intuition, that is." She was deeply disturbed with him, confused about who she was, and she just wanted to wield a rapier and lash out at something—anything. Her head hurt with all the conflicts dueling for predominance in her mind.
Seeing that they were getting nowhere, fast, he decided to lay aside his task and tell her about the letter he had gotten after dinner. He explained why he believed the letter had been a fraud. It had revealed nothing that King Charles would not have received through his well-informed network of spies. There were no code words identifying any of those he trusted. In fact, the lengthy letter merely encouraged him to stay put in England until matters in France could be worked out. No, d'Artagnan rejected that those words were penned by anyone he knew. Angry at himself, he apologized to Jacqueline that he had not seen through the arrival of the correspondence to be Charles' ruse to be alone with her.
At his mention of her time alone with Charles, she felt her skin crawl. The recollection of what the man had said and done suddenly suppressed any lure she had for answers. She looked at her husband, knowing that he was right despite his crassness. And she knew she would have to tell him the truth, even though she was afraid of what his rash, chivalrous character might cause him to do; which, in his present state of mind, she wouldn't put it past him to take his entwined bed linen to the king's throat instead of scaling out the window with it. Sighing deeply, she bit her lip and turned toward him, deciding that he had the right to know, and filled in the details of her moments alone with the king.
Her honesty solicited a different response than the one she had anticipated. Instead of stomping after the king for revenge, d'Artagnan seemed relieved at her grasping the danger of the monarch's empty words. Taking her hands in his, he leveled with her about his fears of the Englishman's plans. With nothing remaining withheld between them, they were free to face their shared reality.
For a moment, he studied the uncertainness in her stance. Reminding himself of his promise to be her reasoning, he quietly motioned her toward the window. "Speaking of what's real, take a look outside for yourself. Half the city's on fire, Jacqueline." He could see that she was wrestling with her judgment, and he tried to encourage her to ground herself in her beliefs. Cradling her hands within his, he gently lifted them up between them and softly relayed, "Remember how we prayed before we got to the hot-water spring, and we asked God to lead our steps? Well, I think he couldn't have given us a clearer sign. God's timing's impeccable. It's obvious he's providing a cover for us to leave."
"It just doesn't make much sense to me," she responded weakly. "Why would God bring us all the way to England, and then turn us right back around again to leave as soon as we got here?" Her eyes met his, begging for reassurance.
He knew that she was dealing with an enormous blow to her identity and he wanted to reassure her of his certainty more than anything else. But the truth was, he wasn't sure and he wasn't going to lie to her. Lifting a single hand to wipe away her previously shed tears, he avowed, "I don't know, Jacqueline, but I can tell you that I've never been so concerned about you before. Look at you—" he tenderly faced her toward the mirror, standing behind her "—we may have only been here for less than a day, but you're not yourself, and honestly, it's frightening me."
The dolled-up Frenchwoman glanced in the mirror. A scared, lavishly adorned woman she did not know stared back at her. Even her cross necklace no longer looked the same. What was worse than the outward unfamiliarity was that she no longer knew the woman beneath the façade. D'Artagnan was right. She consented that in the few short hours they had been here, she had changed…correction, she was changing. Inside, she could feel it taking root. But while she now believed she was not the child she had thought she had been all those years, she also had no idea who the woman was that she was supposed to become.
Seeing her gaze blankly at her reflection, he enveloped her in his arms and restated his decision, "We're leaving, now. We're going back to France and we're going to have to get our answers there." With summoned optimism, he took her by the shoulders and brightened his tone. "It shouldn't prove difficult, now that we know where to go with our questions."
He left her side and quickly paced the distance to their stocked wardrobe. Her vacant stare followed him as he returned with two dark-colored cloaks in his hand. Approaching her in renewed flurry, he drew one of them around her back and placed it over her shoulders. He paused to search deeply into her eyes before scooping his free arm around her back. Pulling her to himself, he tenderly put his lips to hers.
His display of affection caught her off guard; yet, it had the effect on her of a summer sun on the spring snow. As her tension melted, she began to feel warm and alive. She could sense his fervency was fueled by a man in love and not one out for his own personal gain. Her only thought became how blessed she was to have him. Released to his embrace, she willfully returned his passion. Then, as unexpectedly as he had initiated their intimacy, he abruptly pulled back to leave her breathing heavily in his absence.
Resisting the path his mounting feelings led to, he retreated as though he were a man impaired by forceful separation. "We don't have time for that right now." Then deviously lifting a corner of his mouth, he added, "But if you're interested in more, you're going to have to come after it." Returning to the window ledge, he smiled and motioned for her to join him.
Shaking her head at his cad-like behavior, she released a deep breath and groaned, "You're impossible."
Straddling the sill, left leg out the window, he turned to look over his right shoulder and queried, "Coming?"
Surrendering her position, Jacqueline moved quickly toward the window ledge to sit facing him. Something that had been begging for her attention in the back of her mind since dinner that evening, suddenly made connection with synaptic clarity. Grabbing her husband's hand from taking the rope, she relayed with shock, "The note Louis gave me at my acquittal…it said, 'guard the secret at all cost.'" Her recently romanced countenance now wore the look of grave concern. "If Charles knows the secret, then…"
D'Artagnan locked sight with her and somberly finished her thought, "…then it's all the more reason for us to get word of that back to Louis, so England's new sovereign doesn't use it to blackmail him."
Ironically, strength returned to Jacqueline when she refocused on the larger, more important issues at hand than her own struggles. She was thunderstruck at how God could have orchestrated all their previous circumstances to work together for this greater purpose—to affect an entire nation's destiny. Their trip away from Siroc's crucial moment of discovery had not left them out of the hub of events—as diverted and useless Musketeers. They had been called on their own assignment by their heavenly king. And now, if they succeeded in getting word back to Louis, he would be spared the manipulation she had undergone at the whim of the English ruler. With each connected thought, she felt the life-blood return to her veins. She wasn't about to stop trusting God now; she was convinced more than ever that he knew what he was doing.
In awe of her recent revelation, her eyes followed her heaven-sent companion. Whispering, she said, "I hope you know that I love you, d'Artagnan." Even in his mulish behavior that evening, she could see now that he acted only upon his utmost concern for her and for France's king. He really was her 'noble d'Artagnan.' And in the midst of all her doubts, she had never felt so in love with this man than she did at present. He was nothing like the man who had violated her trust earlier that evening. She knew she would follow the devoted man before her anywhere; he had won her so completely.
With mutual understanding, a smile pleasantly broke out on his face. "Let's go," he responded. While the loyal husband firmly lowered his cloaked wife to the ledge below with his make-shift rope, he considered what he had ever done to deserve her love. Although it eluded him, there was one thing he did know: She did love him. And knowing that, he wasn't going to let the king of England or anyone else, use her to fulfill their lusts. If what the sovereign alleged was true—that she was the daughter of significant lineage—then the Musketeer husband had an even larger responsibility to France to see her returned safely. That would even take precedence over the duty he had to her as her husband, which alone would have been more than enough.
D'Artagnan had told Jacqueline before that royalty had only two interests—land acquisitions and alliances. In the young husband's book, this Englishman had had his share of chances to prove his character, and it was obvious now that King Charles II had cared no more for Jacqueline than he was capable of caring for a barmaid. He had previously used her and solidified that with proof when he had lied to her about his assassination attempt on Cromwell. Now, it was clear he intended to use her again to achieve political gain. The Frenchman had no doubt that the king of England was all about power and pleasure, and d'Artagnan determined that he would rather die before his wife would provide the unscrupulous English king with either.
ooooooo
Power, pleasure and politics seeped deep beneath the showy glitter of more than one royal residence. France, like England, had its darkened moorings. While Charles II slyly manifested his belligerence on the d'Artagnans, Louis XIV was steadily eclipsing into Cardinal Mazarin's clutches under the shady workings of Jean-Baptiste Morin. In this obscured hour, hope was a coveted watchword.
Underneath the framework of Louis' palace, one Musketeer pressed on to give hope its substance. Siroc wiped the sweat from his brow and placed his lantern down. He had wandered through tunnel after tunnel, and still there were more. To the wearied explorer, the mazes appeared endless.
Lowering his tired body to the cool stone, the beacon holder extrapolated the purpose of his surroundings. The sepulcher feeling of this place reminded him of a mass Jacqueline had talked him into attending some time back. Brother Antoine had read from the Holy Scriptures about the outwardly showy lives of arrogant men that clothed dead-man's bones within. That's what these air-bereaved catacombs spoke of to him in regards to who carried out their business here—living dead men who scoured these caverns like rats, eating out the life from the palace above. The thought was intriguing, but he reminded himself that theorizing on their indoctrination wasn't why he was here.
Mindful of the task at hand, Siroc reached into his workbag and pulled out another candle for his miniature hand-held, self-engineered dark lantern. Carefully lighting it, he removed the spent wax from the encasement and fitted its replacement. From the remnants of his ingenious optic device that aided in the discovery of the chameleon, he had constructed yet another nifty invention. The mirror fragments behind the candle directed a small, but focused beam of light to pass through a dioptric, refracting lens that amplified its path. In effect, only a dwarfed, long-burning candle was enough to light his way for an extended period of time. And with a flick of his finger, he could close the shutter and mask his presence if he heard someone approaching. With his lantern set, the man on a mission continued with his penetration of the palace infrastructure.
Siroc had been in Mazarin's opaque passageways for some time by now. During that time, he had quickly come to realize that these tunnels within the bowels of the palace had long preceded the Premier. They had been built into the stonework. Some older portions that he guessed had been constructed in the early part of the millennium evidenced signs of alteration. Even so, the self-studied archeologist deducted that the network had been long in place before Cardinal Richelieu's days.
But as every good scientist asked, Siroc also questioned, 'why?' The hypothesis that burned in his reasoning was that the vices of undermining powers had also been long in place and as deep-rooted as these caves. The implications of that history were mind-boggling even for the genius to fathom.
He knew that it was not uncouth for castles to have built-in escape routes and even a few short-cuts carved into their walls for the privileged. Siroc doubted the tunnels he was in currently served for either purpose. He would challenge the thought that King Louis even knew about their existence. Perhaps royalty in the past had been privy to their access, but the assessor pegged that Mazarin was the sole proctor over them now. They breathed of his stench.
Wandering through these silent walls, time took on a different dimension. To keep his mind alert, he speculated how long France had undergone these inward battles. How long had she been held captive by those undermining the very foundation of the enthroned rulers? These things the blond-haired man could not answer, but he was determined to get to the bottom of the Cardinal's deception and make him pay for at least his portion of this injustice.
Siroc knew he'd have to be careful. In seeing what he already had, he was a threat to the secret society's existence. He had to return safely to reveal his findings or the deception would go on for how many more countless generations. He had to stop it here and now. And the soldier knew he would have to be the man to do it.
He wondered. If he had he accepted the Cardinal's offer to work for him on the Da Vinci notebook inventions, would he have been welcomed to these catacombs instead of being a spy? Perhaps, he considered the paradox. The inventor shivered at the recollection how his services had been solicited by the dark man. Over a dainty dessert, the red-clad man had tempted the inventor with endless resources for the development of his discoveries. The Musketeer had not touched the cake; he had no taste for the Cardinal's sugar-coated deceptions.
Siroc attempted to refocus his thoughts to brighter, more pressing things—his friends. They depended on him to steer clear of capture and live long enough to complete his mission. He had to succeed in finding proof of Mazarin's wrong doing. Holding his dark lantern before him, he steeled himself against the darkness that surrounded him. Hopefully, he would discover a palace thief that was out for something much larger than a prize from India. If all went well, he would capture the man out to steal the throne of France and ruin the lives of those the inventor cared about most.
Concerned about his depleting candle supply, he told himself he would have to get moving. He, as well as France could not stay in this darkness indefinitely; he would have to press on to uncover Morin's work before the sun king slipped into the recesses of this nightmarish labyrinth.
ooooooo
The Queen-mother sat in her unlit chambers—alone—just as she had been since the news of the Cardinal's un-relentless quarrying of his prey. Would the devil never stop? Would her offspring never be safe from the evil schemes of His Eminence? In the wake of her present direness, her past came back to haunt her.
As a young queen, she had seen King Louis XIII slip under the demonic influences of Mazarin's predecessor, Cardinal Richelieu. Being a fledgling wife in a foreign land, she felt powerless to save her husband. With the mind of her spouse clouded, she feared what both puppeteer and his enslaved marionette would do with any children she would bear. So she invited her barrenness and avoided her husband's affections.
In the king's unfulfilled furry, he sought the arms of another. Eventually, the queen learned of his son born to the La Rue mistress and her fear turned from bearing an heir to not bearing one. Reluctantly, she submitted to her resentful husband who blamed her for his affair and for not giving him a child. Still bitter toward her, he threatened her, that if she did not give birth to a male, he would swiftly end the wench's life. Thus, the new mother, under the pretense of a miscarriage, had put her first born—her precious daughter—away, to spare her life.
Much had gone wrong in the course of that night, and in the end the child was lost. With her loyal Musketeer being called away to duty, and the priest and mid-wife having never reported back, the whereabouts of her infant became a mystery.
Bound under Anne's oath, the devoted soldier never brought it up again—until after Louis' coronation, when he paid her an unexpected visit in the night to tell her that he had found her daughter. On bent knee, he revealed his turmoil in learning that his son and the woman who carried the queen's cross had fallen deeply in love. Lathed in his own tears, he apologized for keeping the royal offspring's marriage to his son a secret. He swore he had only done so to shelter his queen from more pain and to avert laying a burden on the couple by unearthing a past they could not change. D'Artagnan alone insisted on full responsibility of fault and offered his disgrace and commission in exchange for a chance to save Jacqueline's life.
Anne was beyond shocked to discover that Jacqueline Roget-d'Artagnan was, in fact, her first born and that she had been taken in custody by Cardinal Mazarin. But she would not share her blame as she had foolishly done so in the first place. Deciding to face her fears instead of running from them, she insisted it her obligation to tell Louis and to ask him for help. In doing so, she held nothing back and exposed her sins to her newly crowned son, petitioning him to intercede. The king took heed of his mother's request—although struggling to reconcile her past error in his heart—and saved his blood sister from her fate.
Ecstatically relieved with the successful acquittal, the parent wanted so much to re-establish a connection with her child. She extended every invitation contrivable, but the mother kept her identity anonymous. Anne had full confidence that d'Artagnan's son would keep her daughter safe, just as his loyal father had done so for her. She was satisfied with knowing her girl was alive, safe and near enough to visit as often as excuse permitted.
But then, Mazarin reinitiated his un-ending bend on Jacqueline's destruction and Anne's nightmare began all over again. Only now, Louis was missing, along with the Premier's niece. The anguished parent withdrew to her private room and locked herself away. She consented to see no one. Her greatest fears had been realized. What had begun with Richelieu would continue with Mazarin; the souls of her children would belong to the Cardinal, as had her husband's. It was more than the heartbroken woman could bear.
In her state of despair, a knock came softly on her door, followed by Charles d'Artagnan's unannounced entry into her darkened chamber. He knew there had been no need to ask permission for an audience; she had been waiting for him. Jarred by the sound of the opening of the door, the detached mother looked up with tear rivulets etched on her face. The tiny brooks swelled into streams as she broke into unchecked sobs at the sight of her visitor.
Rising to her feet, she threw her arms around her loyal friend and cried, "Charles! Our children…What shall we do?" At last, she had someone at her side that she could share her troubles with. This man had stood by her from the start. He had been there to console her, to offer his fearless duty in carrying out her will, even when it was questionable. In this desperate hour, she was convinced that he was the only one who could offer her any hope.