The Musketeer's Apprentice Read online

  Bazin crossed himself and shook his head, and, as D’Artagnan moved away from the sword, sighed and said, “Not a duel, sir… and yet it might not be a bad idea to bring your sword. There are… It pains me truly, but my master seems to always end up setting himself against men of the church and the Cardinal…”

  “The Cardinal!” D’Artagnan said, trying to reach for the sword and his hat at the same time and managing only to kick his chair out of the way-since his sword was on the table and his hat on a chair in the opposite direction. “The Cardinal. Is one of my friends in danger of arrest, then?”

  Bazin started to shake his head, then shrugged. “Well, monsieur, the life you gentlemen live, are you ever more than a few moments away from being thrown in prison for one reason or other?”

  D’Artagnan opened his mouth to retort, then closed it with a snap. Part of the problem was that Aramis made no attempt to control his servant’s mouth, the other part was that Bazin was in fact not a real servant and certainly not a musketeer’s servant. Rather, he was a monk playing at being a servant. And every chance he could possibly get to sermonize he would seize with the enthusiasm of a preacher on a mission through heathen territory.

  Before he answered, D’Artagnan could see himself goading Bazin into a never-ending, spiraling argument, which would include the fate of those who lived by the sword as well as a plethora of details and curiosities on the lives of obscure saints and martyrs, at least one of which Bazin would-invariably-compare himself to.

  So instead he inclined his head in less than an affirmative and reached first for his sword in its scabbard, which he fastened to his waist, and then for his hat, which he slapped on his head with grim determination. In doing so he caught sight of Planchet’s mildly amused look. “Planchet,” he said for no better reason than to spoil the young man’s amusement. “Follow me.”

  He felt inner satisfaction in seeing the young man’s startled and worried face, but didn’t stay to savor it, nor did he wait for Bazin to take the lead. D’Artagnan knew his way to Porthos’s place well enough. And besides, while Aramis and even Athos might think they needed a servant to walk ahead of them and cut a path through the Paris crowds for their impressive selves, D’Artagnan had no such great idea of himself.

  Oh, his family was the wealthiest and noblest in their village. Which wasn’t saying much. All told his father’s land, all small inherited parcels put together, wouldn’t equal the amount used for the children’s cemetery in Paris. His father had been a glorified farmer with better pedigree, and the whole of the servants in their commodious farm-house had been two-his father’s valet and helper, and his mother’s maid. A couple married to each other and inclined to treating D’Artagnan as one of their own children.

  He was no more used to having a servant to separate him from the populace than he was used to regarding himself as a great lord. He ran down the stairs and opened his door and stopped.

  Before him stood a vision of loveliness. She was blond and her features were of the sort young men dream angels might have. D’Artagnan stared at her, shocked, none too sure she hadn’t come out of his own disordered dreams.

  Oval faced, slim but with an ample bosom shown to great advantage in a well-cut gown of the sort worn at court, the sort that D’Artagnan had only seen from a distance while helping his friends guard the entrance to the royal palace. It was velvet and pink and… it pushed up where it should and it molded where it must.

  Its owner was looking at D’Artagnan with the thunder-struck expression and the slight blush that made him absolutely sure that he was dreaming. Women-particularly women as beautiful and delicate as angels-never smiled at him and certainly not this way.

  “I… I…” he said, and realized he had his hat still on his head and whipped it off with a flourish. “I’m sorry, madam. I’m not used to seeing duchesses in this neighborhood. My name is D’Artagnan and I lodge here. I am a guard of Monsieur des Essarts.”

  The woman smiled wider, a slowly widening smile that made D’Artagnan feel his cheeks heat as though in the full blaze of sun.

  “I thank you,” she said, inclining her head. “But I am not a duchess. My name is Constance Bonacieux and I live here too,” and with her hand she indicated the door to Monsieur Bonacieux’s dwelling.

  D’Artagnan tried to imagine the wizened old man and this beauty and shook his head. “You are his daughter?” he asked. “His niece?”

  But she only laughed. “His wife. Though most of the time I stay at the royal palace where I serve her Majesty.” She blushed and looked down. “I am Madame Bonacieux.”

  D’Artagnan registered the disappointment that she was married at the same time that he thought she’d looked down as though embarrassed at being married. And he thought that Porthos’s lover was married. And Aramis’s lover had been. And then he couldn’t think anymore because his mind was too full and his heart ready to burst and he could neither move nor speak looking at her.

  A throat was cleared loudly behind him and he turned to see Bazin glare. “My master said-”

  “That I should hurry, of course,” D’Artagnan said, and turned back to see Constance curtseying at him. Again his heart was full to bursting, but this time it compelled him to action. He ran to the side of the house where roses with broad satiny pink petals spilled over the garden wall. Late blooming roses, their fragrance intoxicating in the air. He reached for one, ignoring the bite of the thorns on his fingers, and pulled it free of the vine, then scraped the thorns off with his fingernail and, bowing, with hat held to chest, proffered Madame Bonacieux the rose.

  She blushed as pink as the rose and for a moment looked as young as D’Artagnan’s seventeen years of age. A glimmer of tears appeared in her eyes as she said, “You shouldn’t, monsieur.”

  “The flower deserves to be ornamented by you, madam,” D’Artagnan said, and bowed.

  She blushed darker. “Thank you,” she said. And she took it.

  He bowed to her again then ran, since Basin and Planchet were already walking a bit down the street. It wasn’t till he’d caught up with them and passed them, on the crowded sidewalk that he realized he’d given her one of her husband’s own roses. And it wasn’t till he was almost at Porthos’s door that he realized that the way she had blushed she must not be used to such gallant gestures. Well. He’d never had too good an opinion of Monsieur Bonacieux and now this decided it all. The man was a low creature, not deserving such a wife.

  With this thought in his mind he started towards the front door of Porthos’s lodging.

  “Not there, Monsieur D’Artagnan,” Basin said. “The practice room. At the back.”

  “The practice room?” D’Artagnan asked. Basin nodded and D’Artagnan started down the alley towards the back gate, then trotted along the garden to the broad door at the back of the house which led to what he assumed was an abandoned cellar where the four of them often practiced sword fighting.

  That they were meeting here must mean he was required for second in a duel that demanded extraordinary skill. He flung the door open and stopped, shocked.

  The three musketeers were there, assembled around something lying on the floor of the room.

  Not something. Someone. A corpse. But it was not a corpse as D’Artagnan was used to seeing them, after duels or brawls. It was smaller, more delicate. A child. It was a child.

  “Sangre Dieu,” he said. “What is this?”

  Where Poison Might Be Useful to a Churchman; Pedigree and Ancestry

  ARAMIS turned from where he knelt, on the stone floor by the child’s body. So young a child. Somehow he didn’t count on that, though he’d heard that he was only twelve. Perhaps Aramis had forgotten what he had looked like at twelve. Perhaps it was living all day, everyday amid rough men that made this small corpse seem more pathetic and frailer than it should have been.

  He heard D’Artagnan’s exclamation, he saw out of the corner of his eye as Porthos turned to explain the scene, helped now and then by Athos’s sing
le, prodding word.

  Aramis, in his turn, was looking at the corpse. He wasn’t sure the boy had died of poison. There was no way of knowing. It could have been poison or a sudden illness. But Porthos’s description, and the child’s fixed and dilated pupils, and the dry skin which seemed still too dry added up to a feeling in Aramis that there had been a poisoning done here.

  There were other details about the body. The suit he was wearing was good. Or good enough. But though the violet velvet had been the best money could buy, and though it had once been well tailored, it was obvious to Aramis’s considering eye-used, at any rate to examining form and fashion among all-that it hadn’t been tailored for this boy but for another. One who’d been larger of shoulders and thicker of waist.

  It might mean all or nothing. It might mean the boy’s family was that sort of mean nobility hanging by their fingernails to the edge of their birth privilege, forever afraid of dropping off. They would buy the best thirdhand and be quite glad they could afford it. That would fit with a family just come to town to seek their advancement at court. But then, this level of wear, and the suit not tailored for the wearer would fit just as well a family of the highest nobility and careless of appearances. Those with many boys often passed the suits down the line as each of them grew out. And then, if Guillaume had been destined for the church, he was probably the second child or third. Often it was first to the land, second to the army and third to the church, though those last two were often reversed.

  Aramis permitted himself a bitter smile that he was one of very few only children to be raised for the church. There were reasons for that, and at any rate, he was not dissatisfied with his vocation, such as it was. If he could control his immoderate fondness for the fair sex, he would be able to be a great churchman. A bishop or… he was aware of a smile sliding across his lips before his brain commanded it. Or a Cardinal.

  “Is there anything to smile about?” Porthos asked. He’d walked around and planted himself near the child’s head, looking down at Aramis. He was pale and he was sullen and he looked truculent as though he could barely wait to find someone on whom to take out his anger.

  Aramis shook his head. Any man in this mood was scary. A man who knew how to use a sword in this mood was very scary. And a man Porthos’s size was always very scary. “No. I was thinking of… my mother.”

  This got a sudden raising of the red eyebrows above Porthos’s eyes and he said, “Oh.”

  Aramis hastened to change the subject. “Was he hot, Porthos? When you found him?”

  “Hot?” Porthos said. “Yes.” He nodded slowly, as though considering it. “Hot as if he had a fever, and scarlet as if he burned with it, and seemed to be hallucinating too. And he said he was thirsty.” He paused for a moment and let out air in a sound that was neither sigh nor huff of exasperation but had hints of both. “Was it poison, Aramis? Or did something befall him on the way here? He seemed perfectly fine two days ago, when I saw him last.”

  Aramis shrugged. He looked into the child’s eyes and shook his head. “I would tell you it was just a fever,” he said. “One of those sudden fevers that kill in a moment. Except…”

  He looked up and met with Porthos’s concerned glance, and sighed because he very much suspected this was indeed murder and though a fever might have meant they were all now in peril, a murder was yet something else again. Together the three of them had unraveled two murders done by stealth. Neither of the murders had proven easy to solve. And both of them had brought far too many complications that none of them could have dreamed or anticipated. Even the murder that didn’t pertain to him had involved the Cardinal. And each murder had come close to destroying the four friends or at least to chasing them out of Paris and out of the musketeers.

  “What?” Porthos said. He squatted down, so that his face was as close to being on a level with Aramis as it was likely to get. “What do you suspect? What causes your suspicions? ”

  Aramis sighed again. “It is his pupils. They are wide and dilated. You said he talked of angels and of flying. I think he was poisoned and from the symptoms I would say it was belladonna, which the Englishmen call nightshade.”

  Porthos frowned. Athos and D’Artagnan, on the other hand, seemed to inhale at the same time and then to remain silent with what was more than just the absence of words, like certain nights are darker than merely the absence of light would warrant.

  Aramis looked up and saw Athos’s face set and serious. “You know much about poisons, Aramis,” he said, slowly.

  Aramis raised his eyebrows. Sometimes Athos’s reactions were unaccountable, though the Gascon, too, was looking pale and drawn and suspicious.

  “You don’t think I killed the boy,” he said, heatedly. “What reason would I have had to-”

  Athos shook his head. “I never thought that,” he said. “But I wonder what part of your upbringing had to do with learning poisons and why this was thought necessary.”

  “When I was a very young man,” Aramis said. He avoided looking at his friend because if he did he would have to take offense and he didn’t want to call Athos for a duel. “In fact, about the age of this poor child, I was, for six months, apprenticed to a Benedictine monk who believed in the practice of charity by more visible means than the disbursement of wealth. He treated illnesses through herbal remedies and at his knee I learned the use of herbs to heal, and their counterpart, the ill effects they could have if misused. ” And, unable to repress his malice, he looked up at Athos’s chiseled features set now in mild surprise. “Why did you think I’d learned, Athos?”

  The older musketeer colored, a rare event and a striking contrast between the blood flooding his cheeks and his normally marble-pale skin. “The Vatican,” he said, not making much sense. “And power within the church. One hears… stories…”

  Aramis grinned, suddenly. He never knew from whence Athos’s fears and suspicions came, but unlike D’Artagnan’s or Aramis’s own, they usually echoed from some deep well of suspicion learned from a book in some library in forgotten childhood. “Indeed, one does,” he admitted to Athos’s murmur. “But the stories one hears aren’t meant to apply to everyone who enters the church. It has never been said that the men in the hierarchy of the church are better than other men, only, one hopes, aided by grace. And, Athos, when I take the habit, if I become hungry for temporal power, I’ll have better means to advance than poisoning those in my way.”

  “That I believe,” D’Artagnan said, with the sound of an exclamation that escapes the speaker unawares.

  Aramis nodded at the young man. “And that you might. But the thing is, I have reason to believe, from his skin still being very dry, that he died of belladonna. This can’t be sure, but I’d wager it.” As he spoke, he started looking through the corpse’s attire.

  “Aramis!” Porthos said. “Surely you don’t mean to search him.”

  “Surely I do,” Aramis said.

  “But his family!”

  “We must find his family. And there is no one to tell us who they are or where they live.”

  “He said his name was Guillaume Jaucourt.”

  “A name none of us has heard. Porthos let me look. A letter, or some trinket with a coat of arms will get us that much closer to restoring this child to the relatives who, for all we know, search for him in vain even now.”

  But the doublet had no hidden pockets. It wasn’t till Aramis patted the corpse down-gently as though some part of him feared waking the child-that he found, beneath the edge of the doublet a leather purse. And within the leather purse…

  Aramis removed the purse and the tie that held it at the child’s waist, and went through its contents.

  There was only a sheaf of pages, looking like paper that had been scavenged a bit from everywhere at random and cut or torn into random sheets. The top of the first one read in the uncertain, scrawled handwriting of a child just learning to write, “The genealogy of Monsieur Pierre du Vallon.”

  This was enough to raise
Aramis’s eyebrows and peak his attention because if very few people in Paris remembered Porthos’s family name, even fewer had ever known his first name. Aramis knew it only as the result of long and close friendship. He scanned the pages. It was damning indeed.

  Oh, Aramis knew very well that Porthos wasn’t of as long or noble a line as his own or Athos’s. From his father’s refusal to let him learn to read or any other book learning- which Porthos had only remedied once he’d come to Paris and been on his own-to Porthos’s broad shoulders and the way he approached life, all bespoke a family so close to its own peasants that they were only above them by reason of birth. Or perhaps not even that.

  Aramis frowned at the pages. If this was true, if the words on this page were copies of old records or recordings of old gossip, then Porthos’s ancestors had been born plebeian and grown rich through trade until, having enough money and having purchased enough lands, they had declared themselves noble and stopped the payment of the feudal labor tax and claimed ancient noble ancestors. In all this they had been aided by the great plague that had swept the land.

  There were notes referring to the monasteries and village churches where the supposed originals of these records were kept.

  “Porthos,” Aramis said and, without explanation, passed the sheets of paper to Porthos.

  Porthos frowned at them, squinting, and flipping through the pages. Then he let the pages fall from his hand as if he’d lost all interest in them. He looked at the small corpse, his brow knit in incomprehension. “He had a recording of my family line? What does that mean? Is that how he found my true name.”

  “Not unless the recording came with a drawing of you,” Aramis said acerbically. He repented it immediately as Porthos shook his head. Porthos wasn’t stupid, but he was, at the best of times, too literal. And now, in shock… “No, Porthos, think. He couldn’t have known it from that… What concerns me is what it says. About your ancestors. Did he tell you he knew that?”