The musketeer's apprentice (34 page)

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Authors: Sarah d' Almeida

BOOK: The musketeer's apprentice
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Athos made a face, and seemed to be about to refuse, but finally nodded, his expression still grim. “Very well, if I must talk to the woman, I will. Though I can’t imagine what you expect me to find.”
“Only what Guillaume told her, and what she might have answered,” D’Artagnan said. “Always taking in account her expression and reactions, of course. You must rely on your sensible examination of the circumstances.”
“But what do you hope to find?” Athos said.
“Anything, nothing,” Aramis said. “I don’t know. But if her husband did the boy violence, then she might know it.”
Porthos nodded. “This leaves as suspects Monsieur de Comeau, Amelie’s father and mother, my . . . father and, I suppose, my cousins.”
Aramis nodded. “I should mention,” he said, “that I talked to some people I know this morning.”
“People, you know?” Athos said.
“Mostly people of the female persuasion, I assume,” Porthos said, unable to resist ribbing his friend.
Aramis turned to him, his eyes oddly serious. “I can’t determine that either of Amelie’s parents approached the boy,” he said. “But both of them asked around enough about their daughter. And your Amelie’s father stayed at the Hangman for a while.”
“How did you find this out?” Porthos asked.
“Ah . . .” Aramis shrugged. “You’d be surprised what mendicant friars see and hear. I simply asked some whose normal station is near the tavern. It was easy enough, by description of her father and mention of where her mother would be from, you see . . .”
“And my father?” Porthos asked. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Oh, there was no love lost between himself and his father. There hadn’t been for many a year. But the thing was that no matter how much Porthos told himself his father was a boar and a madman with no manners and worse morals, he was still Porthos’s father.
Porthos could remember being a little boy in Marie’s care and thinking his father was the biggest, the strongest and the most wise man in the world too. He remembered seeing everyone in St. Guillaume du Vallon deferring to his father and thinking that he was truly the most important of men. Somehow, the old, cantankerous man who had sent Porthos to Paris and now refused to admit Porthos existed inhabited the same body as the idolized giant of Porthos’s childhood. And he didn’t wish either of them to have committed murder, much less murder of Porthos’s son.
Aramis shrugged. “Your father also looked around, though he must be credited with looking for you first, and then Guillaume. I think he spoke with Amelie. Guillaume’s sister. Other than that, I haven’t found much.”
Porthos closed his eyes and hoped his father hadn’t done anything stupid, but then he had to open his eyes again and go on hoping. He drank the wine in his cup, and nodded, all around. “I shall talk to de Termopillae,” he said.
“I shall go with you,” Aramis said.
“And I,” Athos said, speaking as though he were being asked to sacrifice himself to some unknowable pagan deity, “shall go and interview Madame de Comeau.”
“And I think,” D’Artagnan said, slowly. “That I shall go back to sleep.”
Porthos wondered if the boy was truly still addled from his knock on the head, or whether he wanted to stay home to see if the beautiful wife of his landlord would put in an appearance. Either way, it was a temporary affliction and would surely pass.
A Lady’s Boudoir; The Commerce Stain; The Matter of the Jewels
"WITH
Madame de Comeau?” the little maid asked Athos, giving him the once-over with a shrewd evaluating air.
Athos had dressed in his best and least-patched uniform, brushed his hair and tied it back. He held his best hat—the one with the plumes still feathered out and in good condition—against his chest as he spoke. He was aware that he looked, if not regal—it was hard to look regal in a patched suit—at least noble and dignified. He was also aware—had been aware since he’d reached manhood— that there was a certain air he could put on, a certain way of moving, that gave people the immediate impression he was highborn and much too good for his surroundings and their company. He now threw his head back, with just that expression, and the maid gaped at him.
“Does the lady know to expect you, milord?”
Athos shook his head. The woman ran up the stairs, leaving him in a small entrance room. This was a different entrance than the one he’d used with Madame de Comeau’s husband. Athos suspected that this was the main entrance of the house, and the one that normal guests would use.
The entrance room was narrow but long, fashionably tiled in dark green marble. The walls were a pale yellow that looked, rather, like the paint in some Italian noble houses that Athos had visited with his father, in his youth—freshly applied over still-wet plaster and looking, for that, whitish and faded. On the walls hung what looked like very good portraits, cast about with that look of familiarity that denoted ancestors. Athos, noticing one of a cavalier of the time of Francis I—as least denoted by the man’s attire—was quick also to realize that the painting was far superior to the quality then obtaining and, in fact, so different from his own portrait of his own ancestor of that time that the two couldn’t be from the same era.
He would not expend the time needed to walk around and examine all the portraits, but he permitted one of his small smiles to slide across his lips. He thought he understood, and very well, too, that Madame de Comeau’s sin, like Porthos’s was vanity. Only hers rested on a far less stable foundation than the musketeer’s who, for his continued certainty of superiority, required only his own strength and handsome appearance.
From this small room, a staircase climbed, broad, up to a door that had been painted yellow and studded all over with golden nails. Through that door the maid had disappeared and from that door, there now sounded a cackle that reminded Athos—conscious of being ungallant—of the sound of a disturbed henhouse.
Presently, the door opened a mere sliver, and there was a suggestion of someone peeping through the opening. Athos, suspecting it was the lady of the house, trying to decide of his eligibility for an audience, straightened himself and squared his shoulders. The door closed. And a few moments later, it opened again, to let a smiling maid through.
“The lady,” the wench said, curtseying, “will see you now, monsieur.”
She led Athos up the staircase and, at the top, opened the door and announced, “Monsieur Musketeer,” as if this were some sort of title.
Athos entered the room to find it handsomely outfitted with a profusion of chairs, settees and a reclining couch in the Roman manner, upon which a young woman was lying daintily, holding silken embroidery upon which she seemed to have worked an intricate pattern of very diminutive flowers.
Not a man to judge others by their material worth and—being descended from an old and noble house— even less accustomed to thinking of objects as displays of good breeding, Athos was not yet so unworldly that he didn’t recognize, in the large, gilt-framed mirror on the wall, a Venetian masterpiece worth a king’s ransom. This, taken with the new yellow velvet covering the sofas and chairs, and the newly painted walls with their profusion of just-too-new, supposedly ancestral portraits made Athos think to himself that horse trading might be the way to go.
But he said nothing of the kind. Instead, he bowed, with every appearance of respect, and said, “Madame de Comeau. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I am, as your maid said, a musketeer, but my name is Athos.”
This so provoked her that she sat up, from her reclining position, and fulminated him with an almost glare from very fine, honey-colored eyes. “Oh,” she said. “But that’s not a person’s name. That’s no one’s name. That is a mountain, isn’t it? In . . . Armenia?” She was petite, rather than small, designed on a small frame, but with everything that the most lavish sculptor could want. Her oval face, with its slightly too prominent nose, betrayed more than a hint of Roman blood.
It was a face well adapted to frowning, and while she frowned at him, he bowed hastily. “Madam,” he said. “Few women know that. Few men, even.”
“Oh,” she said, a sound of peevishness, not of surprise. “My father had all of us excellently educated, boys and girls alike. He said a well-trained mind was the best weapon in the world and he did not intend to send any of his children out unarmed.” She frowned at him, dark eyebrows brought low over golden brown eyes. “But it is very provoking of you to call yourself after a mountain. What is your real name?”
Athos thought that, had he not enough reason to be weary of women, reason that had trained him as a dog or a horse could be trained, through severe pain instilling aversion, he would be in some danger now. There was to the woman a combination of peevish childishness and sharp reasoning which would doubtless prove the downfall of better men than himself.
As it was, and because he knew better than to court Madame de Comeau’s—or indeed any woman’s—favor, he permitted himself to grimmace and bow again. “That, madam, is known to my confessor and to very few other people in this world.”
She set her embroidery aside and stared at him. “It is a noble name, that much I know,” she said. “From your way of standing and your address. So why would you hide it? Have you done something to so displease the King that . . . But no.” She flicked the thought away with a careless gesture of her fingers. “No, of course not. If you’d displeased the King, you’d not be in his musketeers.” She frowned again. “But it is some great wrong here, something you very much wish to hide.”
He bowed again, in silence.
She slapped the sofa by her side, with some energy. “Oh, you are a very trying man. Why wouldn’t you tell me? It’s not as though I’m trying to interrogate you so that I can babble it at court.”
He bowed yet again and she sighed. “Very well,” she said, and from the tone of her voice she might have been a queen dispensing a high favor. “Very well, if you must be that way. Please sit down.”
He chose an armchair not too far from her, and sat down. And she sat primly now on her original reclining perch. Her hands folded on her lap spoke of a careful upbringing, as did the attentive glance she bent upon him. “You wish to see me,” she said.
“Yes,” Athos said. “Very much. I’ve asked your husband some questions, but I wish to ask them of you as well. Your husband . . . might not have apprehended the situation as well as you will.” He’d meant to say this all along, knowing that flattery was a good part of questioning people about things they might not, otherwise, wish to share. But in this case, it might very well be true.
“Oh, my lord . . .” She shrugged, a gesture that effectively and tactfully dismissed her husband’s discernment. Then she looked at Athos, giving the impression of turning her whole mind to his speech. “Very well. Tell me what you wish to talk about.”
It had an odd effect of his being interrogated but, lacking Aramis’s interest in and ability to speak to women, Athos felt it was just as well if he progressed quickly to the matter at hand. “I don’t know if you ever even heard of this person, though your maids, apparently think you talked to him. However, there was a young boy, thirteen or so, with auburn hair, who used to come and—”
“Guillaume,” she said, quickly, with no attempt at disguise. “From the Hangman.”
Athos inclined his head, partly to avoid showing her his expression of surprise. “Your husband told me that Guillaume tried to get him to give him a stipend and claimed that he was your husband’s natural son.”
Madame de Comeau put her head a little sideways, a clear expression of doubt that didn’t necessitate her saying anything about her husband.
Athos smiled a little. “I don’t know if he told you the truth.”
The little hand rose and fell in what seemed to be her peculiarly dismissive gesture again. “Oh, as to that, he might very well have. The whole thing is the sort of foolishness that Guillaume would contrive and that Monsieur de Comeau might even find amusing. He has a soft spot for rogues and cheats.” She shrugged. “But you know, he never could be my husband’s bastard. There are plenty of those around my lord’s domain, and they are all, like my lord, small and dark. Guillaume is, as you say, auburn haired, and tall and rawboned enough that you know he’s going to be a great hulking man when he’s done growing.”
Athos, amused by her attitude towards her husband’s profligacy, nodded. “No. He isn’t your husband’s siring. But your husband had him beat and thrown out nonetheless. ”
She nodded, approvingly. “Well, it wouldn’t do for him to go about thinking he had the power to force my husband to dance to his tune, now would it?”
“But he didn’t prevent the boy from coming and hanging around the yard again.”
“Which was his folly,” Madame de Comeau said, her gaze merry. She seemed to view all of this as much of a game. “Because he found out my husband’s secret.”
“That your husband trades in horses?”
At this she raised her eyebrows. “If it is an open secret, then my money was ill spent. Or did Guillaume tell you that? Are you perhaps his attempt to extract more from me? Have a care sir. I neither have the money to give you, nor the disposition to submit to constant fleecing.”

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