The Musketeer's Apprentice Read online

  Now, having declared that he must tell them about his apprentice he’d ground again into silence. His huge fingers played with the gold braid on the edge of his hat and he looked attentively down at them, as though hypnotized by their movement.

  “Porthos, you must speak,” Athos said, commanding his voice to gentleness. His life had schooled him little in such. His father had demanded much of him, from manliness to courage, but never tenderness and never charity to those weaker than himself. He’d been inclined to it at any rate, as a young man who read much and thought more. But he’d had to leave tenderness and finer feeling behind after his wife Charlotte’s death. After Charlotte ’s murder. “Porthos,” he said again, a little louder, as Porthos turned to look at him. “You must tell us who your apprentice is and why he’s dead and why you’re here.”

  Porthos shook his head as though to clear it. “He was Guillaume Jaucourt,” he said. “And he came to me to learn sword fighting. And he died just a little while ago. He’s in my practice room. I’m not sure he was murdered, of course. I think he was poisoned.”

  “He came to you to learn sword fighting?” Aramis asked. “In the name of all that’s holy, why? Why would anyone come to you for sword fighting lessons?”

  Porthos looked wounded, then shrugged. “You did. Once.”

  “You were a sword master then. It is different,” Aramis said.

  And Monsieur de Treville’s voice cut in, cold and sensible and holding only the slightest tinge of that amusement that Porthos caused in most people when they weren’t exasperated at him. “Did he know who you were, Porthos? Or suspect?”

  Porthos shrugged, then nodded. “He came to me,” he said. “And tried to blackmail me into teaching him,” he said. “He was”-the huge hand was held up at about his shoulder height while sitting-“this tall. A stripling with barely as much width to his whole trunk as one of my legs. Redheaded. Freckled. With pimples starting. And he told me I had to help him learn to fight with a sword or he would tell the world my secret.”

  “And you taught him?” Athos asked.

  Porthos looked up. Suddenly he smiled. For the first time since he’d come in looking dismal and cold and lost, he looked like himself. “Not because of the blackmail,” he said. “Look, he was a child. Barely twelve. And all of us when we were children, we were subjected to our parents’ whims. My father didn’t want me to learn to read, and Aramis’s mother didn’t want him to learn to fight. And Athos-” he stopped. Their eyes met and Porthos’s smile died away entirely and he shrugged.

  Athos wondered what he’d been about to say. Porthos and Athos had never, that he knew, discussed Athos’s upbringing. In fact, of all of them, he was the one who’d been least inclined to speak of his upbringing and background. They might know of the crime that had sent him into the musketeers, to flee his conscience more than anything else. But of the time before that, they knew nothing. Athos was not curious enough to ask. Porthos had an inconvenient habit of knowing the truth. He looked away from Porthos and at Monsieur de Treville sitting judgelike behind his desk.

  “Well, I felt that sometimes parents don’t know what’s best for their child,” Porthos said. His voice had lost some of its force but regained it as he went on. “And Guillaume’s parents might not want him to learn to fight, and they might intend him for the church, but some of our best fighters have been men in orders and some of our best religious men have been fierce swordsmen.”

  “Indeed,” Aramis said, not without irony. “His eminence Cardinal Richelieu, himself.”

  It was like Porthos not to take this for a challenge but to accept it as a comment, Athos thought. Because Richelieu had indeed been a fierce duelist in his youth.

  Porthos clearly saw nothing wrong with the mention of him. “Like him,” he said. “So I thought what harm does it do to teach Guillaume a little swordplay, if he can get away from his parents to learn? What ill does it do? Who cares?”

  “His parents perhaps,” Aramis said, his voice cutting cold.

  “Well, perhaps,” Porthos said, and shrugged. “But I figured somehow, and soon enough, that boy would be out on his own and he would do as he pleased. And if he was so desperate to learn that he went through the trouble of finding out who I was and coming to me…” He spread his hands across the top of his hat. “I thought the least I could do is teach him.”

  “And did his family find out?” Athos asked sharply. “Are you sure he died by poison and not from a beating? Some parents…”

  Porthos shook his head. “No marks on him. Almost for sure poison, unless someone hit him on the head. He was talking about angels and flying.”

  Aramis, facing Athos over Porthos’s inclined head quirked an eyebrow. Athos shrugged. It could be anything. The boy’s father might have found out and punished him severely. But why should he? “Wouldn’t it have been easier for the parents to prevent the boy from coming to lessons?” he said.

  “Exactly,” said Monsieur de Treville. He brought his hands up, with his wrists resting on the polished desk, and touched the tips of his fingers together. “Exactly what I was thinking, Athos. I was also thinking that no matter how determined to devote the child to the church, few parents would view this delinquency as little more than a show of spirit.”

  “And if they were determined to send him to the church,” Aramis said, “they were more likely to punish him by making him repeat maxims of the Testament or study his theology.” Somehow he managed an audible shudder in his disciplined, well-bred voice.

  Porthos raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

  “Exactly,” Monsieur de Treville said again, and then, looking straight at Porthos. “Jaucourt, you said? Not a name known to me. A noble family, you think?”

  “He referred to his father as the gentleman Jaucourt,” Porthos said.

  “I’ve never heard of them,” Monsieur de Treville said. “Of course there are many families come from provincial domains in search of fortune or royal favor in Paris whose names wouldn’t be known to me. But usually, if a family is at court, some rumor of their presence, some reference to one of their retainers, reaches my ears.” He wiggled his fingers against each other and seemed immersed in black thoughts. “Did he ever tell you how he found out your true identity, Porthos?”

  “Sir?” Porthos asked, puzzled.

  “If he was truly twelve,” Monsieur de Treville said. “Or thereabouts, surely he can’t have done a great deal of searching out the truth on his own. How would he come by it?”

  Porthos shrugged. “It’s… People know it, Captain. I lived in Paris before I joined the musketeers.” He opened his hands and if to signal the obvious. “And I’m not exactly one of those people who pass unnoticed in a crowd.”

  Monsieur de Treville nodded, but his long, thin-fingered hand stroked at his well-trimmed beard. “Doubtless,” he said, and smiled a little as if to acknowledge that the thought of Porthos passing unnoticed in any crowd was ridiculous. “But it’s been many years, Porthos, and how would the boy know?”

  Porthos shrugged again. “Perhaps his father knew?”

  “From a noble family so newly arrived to Paris that we’ve never heard of their name? Unlikely, my friend,” the captain said.

  “But then,” Athos said, “what do you think is behind all this?” As for himself, he couldn’t anymore have articulated a coherent theory than he could have hazarded a reasonable-sounding guess, but something was working at the back of his mind, something that made the hair stand on end at the nape of his neck.

  Monsieur de Treville shook his head. “I hesitate to say it,” he said. “Since it is possible I am wrong and just of habit attributing the worst of villainy to a foe. But the Cardinal bears you some ill will-has born all of you some ill will for a long time, for being the fiercest fighters in his Majesty’s Musketeers. And since these past two recent incidents in which you foiled his plans…” [1] Monsieur de Treville drummed his fingers on the desktop. “Well, his animosity for you knows no bounds. I would
say, Porthos my friend, it is quite likely the boy was sent to you and told who you were. That his death owes something to the Cardinal. And that things are set to accuse you of murder, in an attempt to defend yourself from blackmail. What-” The captain stopped. Porthos was shaking his head violently.

  “No,” he said. “Guillaume was sincere and sincerely seeking instruction in sword fighting.”

  The captain shrugged. “Perhaps. I did not say he wasn’t. Only that the Cardinal was behind sending him to you and that the Cardinal is behind his death. Or might be. Just because Cardinal Richelieu is the greatest power in France, more powerful even than the King, it doesn’t follow that every plot and every evil should be laid at his door. However, a lot of them can be, and it also doesn’t follow that he is innocent in this one.”

  “And,” Athos said, feeling his uneasiness answered by the captain’s theory, “the truth is that it would be all too easy for him to find a young boy of small nobility, dissatisfied with his lot in life, and to arm him with the means to approach you. It would be no more unlikely than his finding an orphan and putting her in a position to impersonate the Queen, all without the poor young woman knowing she was being used at all. [2] It could have happened that way, Porthos.”

  “But… a child?” Porthos asked.

  “If the Cardinal thought it fit his views of what is good for France, I think he’d willingly kill a newborn dauphin in his swaddling clothes.”

  Porthos looked at Athos, intently, his eyes focusing seemingly with all his will. “If the Cardinal has anything to do with Guillaume’s death, he shall be called out, Cardinal or not.”

  The captain looked alarmed. He came out from behind his desk and put his hand on Porthos’s shoulder. “Porthos, my friend. The important thing right now is for you-all four of you, including your friend D’Artagnan, who was privy to the other crime investigations-to find out who the boy truly was, how he died, and if there’s a culprit. If it turns out to be the Cardinal, I shall take it upon myself to seek vengeance. I shall present proof to his Majesty himself. Meanwhile, I would say you must hide this crime. And you must promise me that you’ll do nothing rash.”

  “Captain,” Porthos said, sounding bullish.

  “Promise me Porthos. Haven’t I saved your life on more than one occasion?”

  “Monsieur de Treville, you have, but-”

  “Then promise me.”

  There was a long silence. Athos could almost imagine the cogs turning inside his friend’s head as he weighed the best course of action.

  At last Porthos sighed heavily. “I promise. I promise I shall do nothing until I know. If the Cardinal is guilty though… I will demand my revenge.”

  “Then we shall talk again,” Monsieur de Treville said. “Meanwhile, I would send for your Gascon friend and start your enquiries.”

  The Disadvantages of a Pious Servant; Yet Another Conspiracy; Not the Expected Murder

  HENRI D’Artagnan had arrived in Paris four months ago and so far his experience of the city was both better and worse than he could have anticipated. This mixed result could be directly traced back to the influence of Monsieur D’Artagnan’s two parents.

  An only child and just barely out of adolescence at seventeen, Monsieur D’Artagnan looked very much like his mother-a small Gascon with olive skin, straight dark hair and piercing, intelligent eyes. From her, beyond appearance, he had inherited a certain hardheadedness of mind and manner and an unwillingness to let any perceived event rest till he’d ascertained the cause behind it.

  From his father, a veteran of the religious wars, Monsieur D’Artagnan had received a more romantic inheritance, to wit, an old sword which had broken in two in his first skirmish; an orange horse of uncertain parentage which Monsieur D’Artagnan had seen fit to divest himself of; a letter of introduction to Monsieur de Treville which had been stolen from Henri on his way to the capital; and the advice to fight often, fight much, and not to tolerate any disrespect except from the King or the Cardinal.

  The letter having been stolen had made it impossible for D’Artagnan to get a post in the musketeers as he had hoped. He had instead been offered a position in the guards of Monsieur des Essarts, a sort of probation he was enduring with all the determined stubbornness of a not very patient man.

  However, the advice to fight often had led him-on his very first day in Paris -to challenge all three of the best duelists in the musketeers. Such his luck, when Athos, Porthos and Aramis made good on their planned confrontation, they had been interrupted by guards of the Cardinal. In a moment-one of those sudden moments of youthful enthusiasm that can and often do decide a man’s whole life-D’Artagnan had thrown his allegiance with the musketeers and against the guards of the Cardinal. Even better, his fighting had been material in turning the duel in favor of the musketeers.

  This had set seal to an unlikely friendship in which the trio of inseparables was transformed into a quartet. And four months, many fights, many duels and countless drunken revels together later, D’Artagnan was not sure he would trade his three friends for a shiny, new uniform of the King’s Musketeers.

  At any rate, he thought, as he sat in his quarters, eating a sparse meal of bread and cheese-having just come off his guard duty and preparing to sleep before whatever revels or duels his friends might have planned for this afternoon-this friendship had earned him the confidence of Monsieur de Treville and it bode fair to win him, also, a place in the musketeers, should one open up.

  A sharp knock on the door startled him and woke his servant, Planchet, who had been asleep on a nest of blankets on the floor. Since D’Artagnan had often heard that sleeping was like eating, and since food was often too scarce in these lodgings for the still-growing Planchet, he’d advised the young man to snatch a sleep-meal whenever he was not urgently needed. Having scarfed down his portion of bread and cheese Planchet had gone to sleep almost instantly. He now rose, rubbing his eyes, his thatch of dark red hair standing on end and looking like nothing so much as an uncertainly piled haystack.

  D’Artagnan waved him towards the door, and, for his part, drank up the rest of the somewhat sour wine in his white ceramic cup, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His lodging consisting of exactly two rooms- the inner chamber in which he slept and this outer chamber, with a table, chairs and a blanket in the corner for Planchet-this was where he must perforce receive all visitors.

  The entrance door was down some stairs, at the same level as the door to the ground floor where D’Artagnan’s neighbor, Monsieur Bonacieux-a worthy merchant- lived. But since D’Artagnan didn’t hear any sounds of arguing and nothing that sounded like Planchet’s heated avowal of his master’s being asleep or on guard duty, D’Artagnan assumed this would not be the landlord in search of his overdue rent. And because he didn’t hear any protests, he assumed also it was not either a merchant seeking payment or an enemy trying to find D’Artagnan.

  Instead, there was a soft murmur of voices, and then the sound of two steps up the stairs. D’Artagnan rose, half expecting one of his friends to come into the room.

  But the man who came in was Bazin. Bazin looked much like a particularly rotund medieval monk and dressed like a monk, in dark and dreary wool. His hair loss imitated a tonsure with some credibility and he walked in small and measured steps well suited to treading a monastery’s hallowed halls.

  That he was not a monk was not in fact his fault. From childhood, Bazin had attached himself to Aramis as Aramis’s servant, reasoning that when the young man achieved the religious orders towards which he was being raised then Bazin could at the very least be a lay brother in the same order.

  The interruption of this course through Aramis’s impetuous if successful duel, and Aramis’s entrance into the musketeers were events which had shattered Bazin’s world as unexpectedly and surely as though a comet had struck through the endless stratosphere and hit the Earth. He couldn’t fully comprehend what would cause his master- whom he was used to thinking of as a well-mann
ered and pious youth-to abandon such a sure course or to embark on such violent ways.

  Long ago, and through no particular course of thinking, but more through the blind resentment of an animal who must blame someone for his misfortune, he’d settled upon blaming the other musketeers for Aramis’s downfall. That D’Artagnan was too late a comer to their friendship to be in any way guilty for Aramis’s present life did not in any way change this resentment. D’Artagnan wenched and drank and dueled with the other three, and therefore D’Artagnan too was to blame. D’Artagnan too-should Bazin be allowed to expound on the matter-encouraged Bazin’s master’s fondness of a sinful world.

  All this-which D’Artagnan had heard expressed in voice once or twice-was written in the servant’s sullen expression as he bowed in D’Artagnan’s general direction, all the while glaring at him out of eyes that seemed too small for the large and round face.

  “Ah, Bazin,” D’Artagnan said, seeking to appear pleased. He should be pleased, because Aramis was-after all-a good friend. And yet, why would Aramis send his curdle-faced servant to D’Artagnan if he knew how Bazin would resent it. Out of the corner of his eye, D’Artagnan saw Planchet settle himself on his blankets to watch, smiling a little.

  Planchet being who he was, and a genius in his own way, D’Artagnan was never too sure what amused Planchet more-Bazin’s sullen dislike or D’Artagnan’s attempt to disguise his own antipathy. Ignoring his own servant, he looked at Aramis’s. “So, Bazin, what brings you here?”

  “My master sent me, sir,” Basin said with that excess of humility that betrays someone very sure of talking to an equal if not to an inferior. “He would like you to come with me to Monsieur Porthos’s house.”

  “What? Now?” D’Artagnan asked, because Aramis knew his schedule and very often one or the other of the musketeers would stand guard with him at Monsieur des Essarts. “But I just came off guard and was about to…” His words slowed down. “Is it a duel?” he asked, reaching for his sword on the table.