A Powerful Little Love

Epilogue part 1

The amount of English nobility landing on French soil had increased tenfold in the last few months, owing to their civil war at home.  Many families travelled to France to seek solace after the death of fathers in battle, and sometimes even eldest sons too.  Paris court though was as it had ever been, unapologetically garish and untamed.  In the year or two since the attack on Paris, Amorette had involuntarily taken on more responsibility in terms of the Queen's own household. She had never wanted to become one of the ladies in waiting who trotted along behind the Queen to do her bidding but she felt herself reeled in as one by one, the old faces began to leave.

Constance was still trusted implicitly by the Queen, so much so that the seamstress had been sent off to manage the Dauphine's household.  Amorette saw her friend occasionally but more often than not the two women conversed in letters, many of them in code.  If Amorette had thought she could escape the life of a Queen's spy, she had been very wrong.  Although she tried to remain upon the fringes of such schemes and offered only advice rather than her services, she could occasionally be sucked in to things when she least expected it.  Those first few months after the Paris attacks had been agonising for the Queen and Amorette knew it.  Anne of Austria had experienced a very difficult birth of her second child and for a time she was so ill that some thought she might not recover.

Recover she did though. Remarkably, she had even much more of a tenacious nature than Amorette would have expected.  Women were expected to feel their sensitivities softening even more after the birth of a daughter but in the Queen, it had enhanced her protective streak.  She had decided that her daughter would have the happiest and most care-free life that her mother could create for her.  Her own experiences as a woman had made the Queen a better mother.  The King, although beginning to ail a little of late, was very much involved in his son's life.  Perhaps he was schooling the little boy a little too hard for his age, clearly trying to prepare him for the day when he would inherit France. 

He saw his daughter not so much.  Amorette had watched how the Queen shielded her infant daughter carefully and protectively and knew that would carry on even into the young girl's adulthood.  There was no talk of betrothals or marriage contracts because the Queen had disallowed them in her presence.  Amorette thought that the little girl's real father would secretly have been glad of all that, if he knew.  Amorette did wonder occasionally just what Aramis knew from his hiding place in a monastery in Verdun.  The reality was, he probably knew even more than she did.  He had not been able to bear watching his two children growing up without knowing who their real father was or watching the woman that he loved make her life with another man.  It had been deemed safest by them all that the Queen's relations with Aramis stopped altogether, but Amorette knew the occasional letter would be sent here and there.  She let Aramis' letters pass under her nose and made no comment of them, preferring to pretend that she knew nothing of them.  They all knew how high the stakes were now in terms of keeping that which should remain secret from prying eyes.  If Aramis had not wanted to leave, he hid it well.  His three friends had out ruled him even before he had the chance to speak.  When he did though, he was in agreement with them all. 

It had helped that he was not the only one to leave.  Porthos had married Alice Clerbeaux with all the haste and flurry that was to be expected when two people who loved each other were reunited after a long separation.  With such a marriage to a woman of nobility Porthos had been forced to give up his commission in the musketeers, but he now had no want or worry for money as his new wife had enough for both of them.  Athos and D'artagnan had both agreed between themselves that they believed the Queen would bestow a title upon the ex-musketeer once a few years of marriage had passed.  It seemed only right as his wife outranked him massively.  Porthos was not one to be bothered by such things though.