Marrying the Musketeer by Kate Silver

Author:Kate Silver
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Wharekohu Bay
Published: 2011-09-30T14:00:00+00:00

Paris did not feel like the same city when Courtney returned to it again after her long absence. Everything had changed while she had been away. Even the mood in the barracks once she reached them was edgier and more intense. She wandered through the rooms, wondering what had changed the atmosphere so intensely. Many of the faces she saw were new, and some old ones were missing. She looked for Pierre, for Sophie, for anyone she knew well enough to ask what was the matter.

At last she spied Miriame, engaged in a game of dice in the corner. Her face was flushed with wine and, judging by the pile of gold coins on the table in front of her, she was winning heavily.

At any rate, she was not pleased to be dragged away from her game. “What do you want?” she asked, stuffing her winnings into her jerkin and casting a regretful eye back at the table. “Lady Luck was with me tonight. I could have cleaned their pockets out, down to the last sou hidden in their lining.”

Courtney raised her eyebrow. She knew Miriame too well to believe that she would leave such an important matter as gambling to mere chance. “Lady Luck and a pair of false dice perchance?”

Miriame stared her in the eye without so much as the faintest hint of a blush and tapped her chest pocket with every evidence of satisfaction. “The very best. They cost me a small fortune, but I won back the price of them in the first two games.”

She motioned Miriame to follow her outside into the twilight of the darkening day where they would have less chance of being overheard. “Where is Sophie?”

Miriame shrugged. “Gone to Burgundy, I heard. She and her husband have thrown in their Musketeer’s uniforms and taken service with the Duke.”

“Why on earth?” Sophie had seemed so concerned with her honor as a Musketeer that Courtney could not imagine her ever willingly giving up her position.

Miriame leaned against a wall of the barracks in the shadows. “She failed in her mission at the last. Henrietta Anne, the English princess and the Duchesse of Orleans, is dead – poisoned by a pair of false monks in the pay of the French King, the brother of her own husband. The King was not pleased that Sophie had tried to save the life of his dear sister-in-law. Her identity was discovered. She had to leave in rather a hurry.”

Poor Sophie, being forced out of the Musketeers in such a manner for the crime of following her conscience. She was disappointed she had not had the chance to say farewell to her former comrade.

Thoughts of her father quickly chased away any sorrow she felt at her friend’s departure. Maybe he had already met the same fate as his fellow prisoner. Maybe her hopes of rescuing him would prove as illusive and illusory as Sophie’s ill-fated quest had been. “The Bastille? Did you not manage to break into the Bastille

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