Read The musketeer's apprentice Online
Authors: Sarah d' Almeida
The musketeer's apprentice (25 page)
“Yes?” Porthos asked him.
And on that D’Artagnan’s sleep-befogged mind cleared. “What I meant,” he said. “Is that doubtless your Athenais will take some time to look through the books and discover whether Monsieur de Comeau has been receiving money from her husband. And even if she discovers it, because the matter is of such long standing—judging by the lord’s stables—how are you to prove he was involved in killing the young man?”
Porthos’s hands closed, on either side of his body. “If he killed Guillaume, I shall kill him.”
“How?” D’Artagnan asked.
“You can’t challenge him to a duel,” Athos said.
“Indeed, no,” Aramis put in. “His extreme old age protects him from such. And what are you going to do if you can’t challenge him to a duel? What do you intend to do?”
Porthos’s hands unclenched, then clenched again. “If he killed my son, I’ll kill him.”
Athos shook his head. “Indeed no.”
“We’d be very poor friends if we allowed you that course of action,” Aramis said. “It is one thing to kill someone in a duel, but another and quite different thing to kill him by stealth and in the dark, or to kill someone of such markedly inferior strength as Monsieur Coquenard. If you kill him it will be murder, and they’ll execute you, Porthos.”
Porthos was quiet a moment, then frowned and asked, as if the question were difficult to formulate, “I am to allow him to live, then? To go on as though nothing had happened? I know that the Cardinal has many such debts to his conscience and yet goes on living and, such as it is, ruling France. But surely, you don’t expect me to take the murder of my son in the same manner and to—”
“No,” D’Artagnan said. “No. We wouldn’t expect it and, indeed, wouldn’t look for it. Only that . . . to get your revenge, you will need to involve the law and that will necessitate more proof than the fact that Monsieur de Comeau was indebted to Monsieur Coquenard, because I fancy that hundreds of people are, and are not, for all that, murderers.”
“But—” Porthos said.
“What this means,” Athos said, his voice serious. “What D’Artagnan is trying to say is that we must gather more proof of his guilt.”
“How?” Porthos asked.
“Well, that was what I was thinking of,” D’Artagnan said. “And why I thought I could not allow this meeting to end before I had established it. We must find out why Guillaume had your genealogy, and indeed if it was him who gathered it or if someone gave it to him, and if he got it, at whose request.”
“How can we find out if he was the one who gathered it,” Porthos said, “when he’s dead? And you’re forgetting he went to St. Guillaume du Vallon.”
D’Artagnan inclined his head. “I’m not forgetting it, Porthos. Indeed, I’m not. But just because he went there, or was persuaded to go there, doesn’t mean he was the one who researched your genealogy—a difficult labor for a lad. And tedious, besides.”
“True, but in any case, he’s dead. How will we find—”
“If he went to the village, he stayed with someone and might have talked to someone,” D’Artagnan said. “We should go, all of us, and talk to people and find out what he did.”
“In my lands?” Porthos asked. “In my father’s lands? You want me to go and question my father?”
“Your father,” Athos said, with a speculative tone.
“Athos, it would be monstrous.”
“No more monstrous than things that happen daily,” Athos said.
"But ...”
“We must,” Aramis said. “Go, as the Gascon says. We will ask leave of Monsieur de Treville.”
“And I will ask leave of Monsieur des Essarts,” D’Artagnan said.
“And before all of that, I shall go and talk to Athenais,” Porthos said.
At the Top of the Ladder; Accounts and Accounting; A Wife’s Loyalty
THE
Coquenard home slumbered in silence. All but the mistress who, having responded to a hail of pebbles on her shutter, had opened the window and let down the rope ladder to admit Porthos.
Coquenard home slumbered in silence. All but the mistress who, having responded to a hail of pebbles on her shutter, had opened the window and let down the rope ladder to admit Porthos.
Porthos had come into the small room—barely large enough for the one narrow bed and the small wardrobe at the foot—and there stood, holding his hat. He’d never felt so awkward in this place as he now did. Or at least, not since the first time that they’d conceived of this way of meeting. He was no longer sure which of them had suggested it, but the first time he’d climbed the ladder and found himself here, he’d been half in thrall of her and half in fear of doing this in a full house, with servants waiting.
Like that first time, this time, he stood by the window, his back to it, silent and still. Athenais faced him, her hair loose down her back, her simple nightgown hugging her body and revealing that despite the white threads in her hair, the fine wrinkles at the corner of her eyes, she was still more beautiful than half the painted misses at court. Her face went from a welcoming smile to a look of alarm. “Porthos,” she said. And after a pause, in which he didn’t answer her, “What is wrong?”
Porthos shook his head, trying to figure out how to begin and how to tell Athenais so many momentous things. Not for the first time, he wished he had Aramis’s facility with words, his ability to ease his way into serious subjects with a quote, a scrap of Latin. But it wasn’t part of him. He looked up, and his eyes met his lady’s serious gaze. “Athenais,” he said, only the word came out more as a lament, than just a saying of her name.
And now Athenais was alarmed, crossing the distance between them, taking his hand in hers. “What is wrong?”
“I don’t know how . . . I don’t know if . . . How can I tell you? How can I ask you?” Porthos said, hearing his voice out of control and trying to keep it low so no one in the nearby rooms would hear him. What if Monsieur Coquenard had already heard him? What if it had cost him his boy’s life? “I don’t . . .” He swallowed hard.
Her hands, holding one of his, squeezed tight. “You must know,” she said. “You must know that there is nothing you can’t tell me. While we have not had the benefit of having our hands joined in church, surely you know that our souls have long been joined, that . . .”
Porthos sighed, a heavy sigh, and said the only thing he could think of, “You will be angry at me.”
“I? Angry at you? When have I been angry at you?”
“All the time. When I brought Athos over. When I do something you think is stupid. When you hear I fought a duel. When I make too much noise trying to get your attention at the window. When . . .”
She smiled. “I do get angry at you, don’t I? Enough, I suppose. But I don’t get angry at you in truth, Porthos. Irritated, perhaps. Annoyed. Particularly when you fight needless duels. But I don’t hold anger against you for any time, Porthos. I don’t resent you for hardly any time at all.”
Porthos blinked. He knew this was true. Oh, in truth of fact, many times he’d climbed that rope ladder to find his Athenais fully dressed, with flashing eyes and stern countenance, ready to read him the riot book for, what she called, his mad behavior and his foolish disregard for his own life and nature. But there was never a time he’d left the room without their having made up, without her having at last smiled at him, even if she told him he was a very great fool as she smiled. And he’d never left without sharing her bed or, time not permitting so much, without holding her in his arms.
He took a deep breath and stepped away from the wall, and across to the bed, on which he sat. It creaked under his weight, as he looked up at Athenais’s worried face.
“Are you ill?” she asked him, anxiously. “You know, you could stay in that little house down the way, and I could come and nurse you often enough and—”
“I’m not ill,” he said. “I know I must look ghastly, but it is not illness. I wish it were, as it would be easier to cure. But it’s not. Alas. No physical illness, at least. My heart . . .”
She searched his features with an anxious gaze. At last she knelt at his feet, and took his hands in hers. “My dear, what are you afraid of? What happened? Did anyone tell you I played you false? For if they did, they were wrong, you know? I never even look at other men.”
It hadn’t ever occurred to him she might play him false, and even now it didn’t occur to him. Although now they were seasoned and used to their clandestine love affair, he remembered how many pangs of conscience it had, at first, cost her, and how difficult it all had been, even discovering some means to be alone together.
He shook his head slowly. “I never thought you’d play me false, Athenais. I know your heart. No. That never crossed my mind.”
“And yet you say your heart has been wounded. Surely, Porthos, you don’t mean really. Was it a wound, or—”
He smiled at her. Her alarm was so far from the mark. And yet he felt his own smile fade as soon as it appeared. “No, no. That isn’t it. It’s just that . . . Athenais, he was my son.”
“Who was your son? The boy who—?”
“Yes, yes. The very same.” He let the words pour out of him, as he told her the whole story of their discoveries and what he had contrived to deduce.
Athenais listened to the story with an attentive air, and then at the end of it, it seemed as though her face, which until then had shown only attention and nothing else, melted. “Oh, Porthos,” she said. “Oh, Porthos, I am so sorry.”
He nodded. He didn’t know how to take anyone’s condolences. “But Athos and D’Artagnan and Aramis say that we must prove for sure why the boy was killed because . . .” And he realized where he was going with this, and this was not how he wished to break it to Athenais. “So that whoever killed him . . . so that . . . So we can prove it to the law.” He realized he’d made a circular argument and took a deep breath. “We must go to the village and see if he was truly there, and if he talked to anyone, and what he might have said.”
“It seems logical,” Athenais said.
“Yes, but . . . Athenais . . . I haven’t seen my father since I left to come to Paris.”
“Well,” she said, stroking his hands, gently. “Well . . . perhaps it’s time you spoke to him, then. Perhaps it’s time you went and saw how things are in the domains.”
“I can’t return, you know,” Porthos said. “I don’t want to, at least.” He flashed a smile, realizing he was lying to himself when he said he simply couldn’t go back. “I don’t want to leave my friends, or . . . or you.”
“Then you don’t need to,” Athenais said. “But you should go, and perhaps make your peace with your father. He can’t be very young, is he?”
“All the men in my family live forever,” Porthos said, shrugging. “But listen, Athenais, there’s something else. Something I’m afraid of telling you.”
“Something you think will make me angry at you, yes, I perceive, since nothing you’ve said up till now could even remotely upset my feelings.”
“The others think . . . that is . . . Monsieur de Comeau has too many horses for his establishment being such as it is, for his fortune being such as it is. They think he’s getting financed by someone and they think . . . In short . . . They think that someone paid him to kill my son.”
“The Cardinal?” Athenais asked.
“Well, no . . . Or perhaps the Cardinal but it could also be . . . someone could have lent money to Monsieur de Comeau for years, and could have offered to forgive him his debt in return for giving the poison to the boy.”
“What do you . . . Oh.” Athenais’s hand flew to her mouth. “You mean . . . Monsieur Coquenard,” she said. “My husband?”
“I told you you would be angry,” Porthos said.
She swallowed, then shook her head. “Not angry, but Porthos . . . no. The . . . He’s still sharp, that I can’t deny, in the business way. Still sharp, though he trusts me with more and more of it every day, but he’s still in control of his business, but . . . but no. Not about me. I don’t think he cares about me. I don’t think he . . . He hasn’t, you know . . . in years, and as long as I appear to be a good and faithful wife to him, as long as I manage his business and look after his household, I don’t think he cares, in the normal way of things whether you . . . you visit me, or what . . .”
“I’m not sure he doesn’t mind, Athenais. Just that he can’t do anything about it. If he could, if an idea presented itself . . .”
Athenais had gone pale. She nodded. “I can’t say . . . Oh, I wish my loyalty permitted me to say that he would never do that. I wish . . . I wish I had the very proper feelings of a wife, and that I could rely on those feelings to say that nothing, ever would persuade Monsieur Coquenard to try to kill anyone.” She put both hands in front of her mouth, then lowered them slowly. “Oh, I am an unspeakable wretch. The only thing I can’t believe—the only thing, Porthos—is that my husband would have the resources to find out about your son, or to know that your son was spending time at Monsieur de Comeau’s. But he might have found it by accident. We get a lot of information in various ways. Whispers in the dark, you know, conversations that happen in here, behind closed doors. It is possible. It is possible he has somehow found it out.” She shook her head. “The only thing I can think, Porthos, the only thing I can say is that my husband being who he is, and my having lived with him for these many years, he’s not a . . . convoluted man. For someone in his work, he’s not a devious man. He wouldn’t think of killing the child, Porthos. He’d be more likely to kill you.” She smiled, a nervous smile. “He would be very likely to kill you, probably stealth or with poison, of course—or even more likely to pay someone to challenge and kill you in the street.” She held up a hand to forestall any possible protest of his. “Porthos, I know that no normal fighter could have killed you on the street, but Monsieur Coquenard wouldn’t know this.”
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