The musketeer's apprentice (30 page)
Read The musketeer's apprentice Online
Authors: Sarah d' Almeida
However, Porthos’s view of gates was always—in Paris or the country—that he would pound upon them till they, presently, opened up.
These opened up—once more proving that rumors flew wide and fast in any village—to show a group of young men, villainous and scruffy, holding pitchforks and various farm implements. Aramis handed the reins of his horse to Bazin and stepped forward, his hand on the pommel of his sword. He’d rarely had to fight this kind of crowd, and he knew that they would obey no rule of combat, and yet, if the day had come that three musketeers of the King—or rather four, since D’Artagnan was a musketeer in all but his uniform—couldn’t take on ten undisciplined youths, then it was time to relinquish the country to the untutored rabble.
“What do you want?” one of the boys, in the front asked, glaring. Behind them there were several dogs, barking and showing teeth. Mutts all of them, none showing the sleek lines or the careful discipline of hunting dogs. Mere brutes, trained to do violence and nothing more.
“I wish to speak to the owner of the house,” Porthos said. And then, focusing on the boy nearby. “My word. Aren’t you Evrard’s boy?” he asked.
The lout who had spoken, a straw-headed creature with flat nose and all the marks of a brutish nature, glared, but was silent, as though disarmed.
“Let me see if I remember your name . . . You are . . . Mathis, are you not?”
The young man looked to the side, to another boy so similar to him that for sure he was a brother or a cousin, and the other boy glared at Porthos in turn. “Grandpa said we were not to open the door to you, and that he had nothing to say to you. He said you’ve done enough harm.”
“Have I?” Porthos asked, mildly. He looked at the boy, frowning slightly. “You’d be Lucas, would you not?”
The young man glared and made some frantic gesture with his hand and, as though at his command, all the other boys started forward, to close the gate. They were a little too slow. At their movement, which took a little time to coordinate, Porthos moved forward and placed his foot in the way of the closing gate.
Aramis stared only half believing. Many times in the past, he’d seen Porthos engage in feats of strength which other men could only watch openmouthed. However, even he was shocked, as Porthos, his foot firmly planted, withstood the ten youths attempting to close the gate by brute force. The gate creaked and trembled, and Porthos’s foot and leg seemed to tremble, also, with the effort, but the gate made no progress towards closing.
One of the pack of boys called out something inarticulate and whistled, and suddenly all the boys scrambled away from the opening while a dog—or at least Aramis assumed the blur was a dog, for in the circumstances it could have been a giant wolf—charged towards Porthos, growling.
Before Aramis, or Athos, or D’Artagnan, could do more than take a step forward, the creature was on Porthos. And it took Aramis a blink and a deep breath before he saw Porthos was in no danger. Rather, having bent down, he had grabbed the animal by its collar and now held it aloft, scrambling and suffocating.
“Let my dog down, you pup,” a man’s voice said, loudly from within. “Let him down, I say. Would you kill my best guard dog?”
“Do you promise not to send your dogs or your boys at myself or my friends?” Porthos asked.
“Yes. Let him go,” the man said, his voice betraying that he must hold this dog in some peculiar affection.
Porthos immediately let the animal drop, and it proved to have no lasting damage, as it first fell heavily, but then struggled onto its legs and, whining, crawled away.
The man who stepped forward to examine it and pat it was perhaps in his late fifties, a tall and spare man, with white hair and a face marked by the creases of a farmer who lived most of his life outside. His beard was wild, and his eyes glared above it. “You had no right,” he said. “This is a respectable house. You have no right to come here, lord or no lord.”
Aramis judged this had gone far enough. He stepped forward. “Old man,” he said. “You have no right to address one of the King’s own Musketeers that way. For it would be disrespect to the King himself, and that in turn would force all the King’s Musketeers to fight you.”
The old man looked at Aramis, and his mouth dropped open. Aramis judged that in these heathen parts they’d never seen a man wearing the latest in soft over-breeches of finest velvet, and perhaps not the looser doublets that were now fashionable. At least everyone he had met here, even the better dressed, tended to favor the tight-fashioned clothes that Athos relished wearing, in the fashion of ten to twenty years ago.
At this moment, as though to increase the man’s confusion, Athos stepped forward. He was doing his best grand seigneur impression, his head thrown back, his hand on the pommel of his sword, and, despite his worn and faded uniform, he managed to look far more the nobleman than Aramis knew he’d ever look. Aramis wanted to glare at Athos, but he knew that would be fruitless, as they’d had this contest many times before and each time Aramis had lost. So, instead, he glared intently at the man.
“My friend came to ask you some questions,” Athos said. “By order of the King. Questions pertaining to the youth who called himself Guillaume and who—”
“I never met any youth named Guillaume,” the farmer said, glaring back at all four of them, since D’Artagnan had taken this opportunity to step forward and stand on the other side of Porthos.
“Oh, surely you jest,” Athos said. “For you see we have accurate information that the youth came here, and we are on his Majesty’s orders to find all we can about his visit and about what he might have said and done.”
Aramis was briefly, breathtakingly impressed by Athos’s capacity to lie. And then he realized that Athos was speaking nothing but the truth. For, after all, they were here on the orders of Monsieur de Treville, and it was doubtless that Monsieur de Treville was speaking on behalf of the King himself. Therefore, since they were investigating the murder at the behest of their captain, they were under the King’s orders to investigate whatever Guillaume had done on his visit to the village of St. Guillaume.
The farmer frowned. “The boy weren’t nothing but his whelp. His whelp and that of the abandoned slut who—”
“Enough,” Porthos said. He stepped forward. “Enough.” His hand went up and closed around the farmer’s neck. “You will not speak of her that way. You—”
“I’ll speak of her as I please. And you know she was a slut, since you was the one who debauched her,” the farmer said, glaring up at Porthos, unafraid of the giant’s hand at his throat.
“Porthos,” Athos said. “That solves nothing.”
“God’s truth,” Porthos said. “And I know it doesn’t. But I would feel better for knowing there was one less villain in the world. How could anyone send his own daughter out into the world, alone and with child, just because they think she marred their precious honor!”
“Oh, it’s very easy for you to speak of honor that way,” the farmer said, stepping back from Porthos’s hand, back from the reach of Porthos’s fingers. “You have lands and papers that prove your family is noble. We have nothing but this farm and what we can make grow with the sweat of our brows. If I allowed the slut to live here, I could only give my other girls in marriage to the poorest of the poor. No respectable merchant or attorney would trust a woman who came from such a tainted background. And why should they, when she had no dowry, either? Now I have made some, and my granddaughters shall leave the house with enough money on their stocking foot to see them to a good marriage. But back then I didn’t. In corrupting my daughter—”
“I didn’t corrupt her,” Porthos said. “I loved her.”
“Funny love, then, that runs off to Paris, leaving her embarrassed. I figured I’d send her to Paris and she could find you and marry you. Or not. It’s not my fault she didn’t find you.”
Porthos opened his mouth and closed it. Aramis wondered whether the telling words in that sentence had had any effect on him. Porthos was both complex and astonishingly simple. It was quite possible he had taken no more notice of those words than any others. As it was possible, too, that he had remarked them all too well and knew precisely what they meant. Whichever way that went, he seemed, for the moment, struck speechless.
“I had the boy beat and thrown out of doors. I don’t know what he wanted, but I know that it took me a devil of time to convince the other boys he’d been some mad fool with nothing to do with them. He came in claiming to be your son and . . . hers. And hers. And now, how I’ll undo the damage of your presence . . .”
“There is no damage,” Athos said. “If only you’ll tell us why you, and, yes, your wife, then visited Paris several times, including I believe last week?”
The farmer seemed to choke on something. “Why we visited? Oh, to do business, for as I told you, we are prosperous now, and we can travel to Paris on business. If you care to ask, you’ll find we visit Paris several times a year. Is this forbidden to the likes of us?”
“Not at all,” Athos said, though his entire demeanor proclaimed he didn’t believe a single word from the man.
As they walked away—without turning their backs, because Aramis judged these were just the sort of people who would do them an injury if they could—the gate slammed forcefully and there was a raised din of men’s voices and dogs, but no one came out.
After a while they turned around and led their horses away.
“He wasn’t telling the truth, you know?” Aramis asked Porthos.
“Aramis, I know you have no high opinion of my intelligence, but pray believe me, I am aware that he wasn’t telling the truth about merely visiting Paris on business. I would bet he went to ferret out Amelie’s whereabouts. And Guillaume’s.”
“And found them,” Aramis said, piqued at being told that he considered Porthos stupid, which was not true. “For else, how would he know you never married Amelie? That would take more than merely looking at parish records. You would have to find Amelie and know how she was living.”
Porthos face darkened at this. “If he found her,” he said. “Then he found his own granddaughter, of the same name, living under pitiable conditions. And he did nothing to rescue her.”
Aramis opened his mouth, but did not know what to say to this.
Porthos turned around, “I have half a mind to go back and—”
“No,” Athos said. “No. Now let us find who is guilty of murdering Guillaume. And then we shall worry about Amelie’s situation. Come, Porthos. You must be patient. For the sake of completeness, let us find what Guillaume told the curate in this parish, that allowed him to copy your family’s records. And then we shall be on the road to Paris, where we’ll endeavor to trace the movements of Amelie’s father and mother.”
Recognition and Identity; Ancestral Tombs; Cousins and Confusion
IT
didn’t surprise D’Artagnan that Aramis took the lead when they reached the church. Among the four of them, they would easily have agreed that churches were Aramis’s special domain.
didn’t surprise D’Artagnan that Aramis took the lead when they reached the church. Among the four of them, they would easily have agreed that churches were Aramis’s special domain.
None of them would have disputed that an occasion that called for Latin, or candlelight, for theology or musty disputations against the number of angels, should, by necessity, involve Aramis. It was like saying that any occasion that caused for an intimate knowledge of the functioning of great noble houses or ancient Greek history would call for Athos; or that a facility with border Spanish and an ease of melding amid those common as muck should be left to D’Artagnan; or even that anything needing the application of Herculean strength and the sort of mental disposition that cut through all sorts of rhetoric would belong to Porthos.
That the church was a small building of huge stones with almost no windows, built in the Roman manner—the sort of church where an entire village could pile in during a war or a a sack and survive well enough—didn’t seem to matter. Aramis advanced, in his fashionable clothes, his soft, loose venetians, his fashionably cut doublet with hanging ribbons and satin trim. When he removed his plumed hat of the musketeer—with which, at any rate, he could never have entered the low door of the church—and advanced into the shadows, his golden hair glimmered like sunlight.
The church smelled of must and long-enclosed spaces, in which generations had crowded and sweated and prayed. The altar was no more than a small cube of time-darkened boards. Upon it, a cloth lent an air of grace, only barely spoiled by the fact that the cloth itself was dusty with time and fraying at its edge.
Behind the altar, a crucifix displayed the hanging Christ, with the curiously distorted proportions of earlier centuries and a profusion of wounds and blood on His pale-painted limbs. The face, anguished above the misshapen body, looked strangely human and realistic, contorted with a rictus of suffering beneath the head, crowned in thorns.
Aramis walked in, and genuflected to the Christ, before clearing his throat loudly, causing echoes to chase each other into the small church. A small man, brown like a nut—the curious brown of small people shrunken by age and tanned by the sun—and crowned with silver hair, emerged from within a little chamber to the side, doubtless the sacristy. He looked at the four of them—all of them clutching plumed hats to their chests—as though he’d never seen such hats or such men. In fact, as though he lived in a completely different world, populated perhaps with angels, or perhaps with more humble creatures who lived day to day, and more close to the land.
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