The musketeer's apprentice (24 page)

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Authors: Sarah d' Almeida

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“Porthos,” Athos said, turning his head to ask his friend about all this. But there were glistening trails down Porthos’s face, running from his eyes to his beard.
And then men appeared before them. They were dressed like guards, perhaps. Certainly their bearing was military. But they wore black breeches and doublets, and no insignias.
The one in front was blond and looked like he was doing a pale imitation of de Termopillae, who normally tried to copy Aramis. He stood in the path that Athos walked and he spoke, with a slight foreign accent. “You will give it to us now.”
“It?” Athos asked. “I don’t have the pleasure of understanding. ”
“It. You know very well what it is. And you will give it to us,” the foreign man said, stomping his right foot.
Athos had absolutely no idea what they wanted. But he knew he was not about to give anything to anyone with such poor manners. “Perhaps,” he said. “I need to teach you how to speak to a musketeer.” He put his hand to his sword, but as he did, the man’s eyes enlarged.
“There is really no need to fight,” he said. “Just give it to us.”
“Monsieur, we don’t give anything to anyone, unless we know what it is and we’re asked properly.”
“Well, no,” Porthos said, drawing his sword. “We easily give them a fight.”
The expression on the man’s face was pure panic. His friends, behind him, gibbered something that appeared to be English. And then they belied their military bearing by turning and running.
Porthos stood, sword in hand, open mouthed with surprise. “Should we chase them?” he asked Athos.
Athos frowned. “Not today. We have other things to do. But it is very odd.”
“It’s the air of Paris,” Porthos said. “It makes even ruffians strange in the head. What they need is a good vacation in the country.”
As happened so often, Athos had no idea whether Porthos was jesting or not.
Dreams and Reality; The Unreasonable Behavior of High Noblemen; Going to the Source
D’ARTAGNAN
had scarce slept the whole night, and waking to go to guard duty, he’d been less than alert. Now, after a long morning standing in the doorway of Monsieur des Essarts, without even the company of his friends to relieve his boredom, he was even more sleepy. So much so that he thought he was dreaming when he found all his friends assembled in his entrance room, around the table.
Only, their presence didn’t exactly surprise him, since he’d suspected today would be spent in enquiries surrounding the death of the child. Also, it was easy to know this couldn’t be a dream since his scrubbed pine table was as bare of all provisions as it had been this morning when he’d left, and the three didn’t even have wine in front of them.
D’Artagnan pulled a chair and sat on it, and then he wasn’t absolutely sure he wasn’t dreaming, because as soon as he’d sat, Aramis said, “Now we’re all here, and, D’Artagnan, you look like the dead, let us have something to revive us.
Holá,
Planchet?” And at the appearance of D’Artagnan’s servant, Aramis tossed a coin in the boy’s direction. “Get us wine. Decent stuff. And some bread and whatever meat you can find.”
As the boy caught the coin overhand and grinned, doubtless thinking of his share of the largesse, Athos smiled and asked Aramis, “Another theology book.”
Aramis shook his head. “Not as it would happen. I went to visit Brother Laurence who, as I told you, is a master of herbs and plants and the properties thereof. While I was there and asking about nightshade—of which I’ve brought a sample of its extract, so you can know the smell which Brother Laurence says is characteristic—and he gave me this new formula he’s had from a Gascon and which is rumored to have a miraculous effect on wounds.” He looked at D’Artagnan, whose eyes had widened. Aramis’s own eyes were merry with mischief. “Since we have our own source of that excellent curative, and my having found that de Termopillae had suffered a grievous wound in a fight with the guards of the Cardinal last night . . .” Aramis grinned. “He was very glad to empty his purse to get his hands on the specific. As it chanced his purse was quite fat.”
At this time, they were interrupted by the arrival of Planchet with an abundance of food and two bottles of wine, which he proceeded to serve. In addition to the bread there was some very good roasted mutton. Three of them ate in silence for a while, but it did not escape D’Artagnan’s notice that Porthos was merely nibbling on a little bread without much appetite.
It wasn’t, however, till they were done eating, and sat in front of newly refilled cups of wine, that Athos said, “I think we must speak of what we found this morning.”
He spoke in carefully measured sentences, of Monsieur de Comeau’s obsession with horses, of his vast stables and many grooms, then frowned. “Before I was done there,” he said, and looked towards Porthos as though worried about the result of his revelations, “I was wondering about the horses, and where money for all those horses comes from. For you must know that feeding that large a stable in the city cannot be easy. They can hardly turn them out to pasture. Even if the lord has a country estate, to which he sends horses in spring and summer, the expense has to be enormous.” He looked around the table, and then Aramis looked back at him with eyebrows raised, saying nothing. Porthos seemed to be lost in some sort of dream or nightmare of his own mind.
“You think he’s being paid by someone,” D’Artagnan said. “That this is the only way he can afford such a large stable.”
Athos inclined his head. His eyes showed that expression they often wore around D’Artagnan—an expression of curious amusement, as though the workings of D’Artagnan’s mind couldn’t fail to amuse him.
“Do you have in mind who could have done it?” D’Artagnan asked, feeling sure that Athos did. It was in Athos’s expression, in the way he was looking at D’Artagnan, as though willing D’Artagnan to voice something he didn’t wish to.
“Many people could have done it.” Athos said. “To begin with, the Cardinal, of course.”
“You mean,” D’Artagnan said. “That he might have done it to implicate Porthos in a crime? It has always seemed a little fantastic, though perhaps it is because I don’t have as much experience of Paris as you do.”
Aramis shrugged, one of his fashionably elaborate shrugs. He glanced at Athos, then turned to D’Artagnan. “Not that it’s impossible. He’s made other plots, just as elaborate, against other people. But normally, when he goes through this trouble, it is against crowned heads and those in power, not . . .”
“Not Porthos,” Athos said. “This has occurred to me. And yet, if he’s taken on a particular animosity . . .” He shrugged.
“There is still another objection,” D’Artagnan said.
“That if the lord had that many horses and had it all before the boy first approached him, surely he can’t have been thinking of such a plan.”
Athos shrugged. “It is possible,” he said. “That he has been in the Cardinal’s pay all along, and that the boy coming along merely provided the opportunity for him to render his eminence a service.”
D’Artagnan inclined his head. It was possible. Perhaps it was even likely. Sometimes it seemed that half the court was in the Cardinal’s pay. “But if so,” D’Artagnan said, “how convenient should it be that he found just the right boy to convince Porthos to teach him, and how cold-blooded to seize on any boy—”
“It wasn’t any boy,” Porthos said, in what was for him a roar, and which must have been heard loud and clear by the neighbors on either side. Then he lowered his voice to say, “It was my son.” His face had gone pale, his features wooden.
“Your son?” D’Artagnan asked, now fully convinced this was some bizarre dream. It was all tied with Porthos’s outburst yesterday and none of it made a wit of sense and he—
“Guillaume,” Porthos said, “was my son.” And proceeded to lay the story before them, in what was, for Porthos, almost an eloquent manner. His lost girlfriend, and the something of her he’d detected in the girl, Amelie. And Guillaume, named after the saint who supposedly protected the village at the center of Porthos’s domain, the village in which his manor house was located. “It is a very small village, you understand,” he said. “It is a very small manor house as well. Just a little place at the butt end of nowhere, and nothing like any of you would trouble yourselves with, but . . . small and humble as it was, it was my father’s domain and yet he thought we were that much better than the peasantry that he would not allow me . . .” He opened his hands, as though to signify his helplessness. “He said Amelie was common as muck, with no name and no ancestors and no fortune either, and I needed someone with fortune, someone, he said, with something in her stocking foot. He said if I left the domain, he would not do anything to her. Only find her a marriage, and be done with it. But if I didn’t leave, he was going to send her parents from the land, for, you see, they only held the land from us.”
“And so you left,” D’Artagnan said.
Porthos opened his hands in a show of helplessness that, in its way, was a more eloquent demonstration of grief than any number of elegies. “And I’m guessing she came after me, instead of taking the marriage offered,” Porthos said. “I swear by the Virgin and all the saints that I never thought she was that attached to me. If I had known . . .” He was silent a long time, chewing on the corner of his moustache. “But I would say the chances are very high, if not absolutely sure—and I’d hold it to be absolutely sure—that the boy was mine. And if the boy was mine, my son . . .” He shrugged.
“If the boy was yours, the wish to injure you might very well have gone beyond a wish to have you taken up for murder,” Athos said, “to a wish to hurt you personally, which brings me again, forgive me Porthos, to the possibility that someone with money . . .”
Porthos looked blankly at Athos, his hands still open on the table. Athos opened his hands, in turn, looking as if he couldn’t quite express himself with voice only. “Look, Porthos, Monsieur de Comeau is living well above his means. That usually means one is in the hands of the moneylenders. And if he’s in . . . If the moneylender has a call on him, he might very well have set Monsieur de Comeau the task of . . . well . . .”
Porthos stared for a long time. D’Artagnan’s understanding, of course, had leapt ahead to Athos’s meaning, but he thought Porthos hadn’t understood it, and he knew that Athos’s delicacy would forbid him from saying it more bluntly. “He means—” he started.
Porthos waved his hand, commanding him to silence. “I know very well what he means,” he said, and frowned. “He means that Monsieur Coquenard might well have given money to Monsieur de Comeau for his damned horses, and that as a result he was able to ask him to kill my son, in such a manner that he would die near me and even, perhaps, get me taken in for his death.” He made a face. “And I don’t say you might not have a point. After all, it is true, very true, you know, that cuckolds can have the weirdest turns. And while I don’t think Monsieur Coquenard cares, as such . . . Well . . .”
Athos nodded. “You can’t be sure. It’s quite possible he knows of the going ons. In fact, given the way you gain access to her house, and how often, I’d be shocked if he doesn’t. And if he knows . . .”
“He would hardly make an open fuss,” Porthos said. “Of course he wouldn’t. Because, you know, their kind doesn’t. They might starve their servants, and they might make the most distressing economies, but all in the secret of their houses. What they present to the world . . .” He shrugged. “And so, you see, I think it is quite possible he would do something like that, by stealth. But . . . that is not of any great significance. I can ask Athenais, you know?”
“And will she know?” Aramis asked. “It is my experience that often ladies don’t know anything of what goes on under their own roofs, save only if they have enough for their paint pots and their face creams.”
Athos smiled at this—one of his odd, secretive smiles that D’Artagnan had learned meant a secret amusement he didn’t wish to express aloud, either because it would forever blight his friendship with someone or because he thought of it as something best enjoyed in secret and silence.
Porthos, on the other hand, was never a man to keep anything to himself. At least not anything he could berate one of them for. He glared at Aramis. “Aramis,” he said. “You’ve met Athenais. If you think she doesn’t know all the accounts and everything that goes on in her husband’s firm and household, you’re a greater fool than I’ve ever known you to be.”
Aramis opened his mouth to reply. Even in the few months that D’Artagnan had known the three musketeers, he’d become accustomed to these quarrels between Porthos and Aramis. They’d arrive suddenly, progress alarmingly fast, and end with one or the other of them calling out for a duel before the offender apologized.
D’Artagnan felt they didn’t have time for it now, and it was entirely the wrong thing. He glared at Aramis, who seemed so surprised to encounter censure from such a quarter that he stopped with his mouth half-open.
Porthos waited for the answer for a second, and when it didn’t come, he got up, shrugging. “I suppose I’ll go to Athenais, then,” he said.
“Wait,” D’Artagnan said, getting up. And having said it wondered what he was thinking. The words had come out of his mouth so fast that he had no time to decide what had impelled them. It was much, he reflected, with chagrin, like Porthos saying that his mind didn’t know what he knew.

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