The musketeer's apprentice (8 page)

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Authors: Sarah d' Almeida

BOOK: The musketeer's apprentice
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Aramis looked about to dismiss the comment out of hand. He got that fighting light to his green eyes that normally meant he was about to dismiss something as a piece of idiocy. But something seemed to come to his mind that stopped the protest on his lips. The mouth he’d opened, closed with a snap, and he frowned at D’Artagnan as if the boy had done something to annoy him. For a while he was quiet, glaring. Then he said, “Well, what do you suggest then?”
D’Artagnan shrugged. “I don’t know what to suggest,” he said, opening his hands in an expression of helplessness. “I’d say describe him, but description alone might not be enough. How many boys of eleven or twelve do you think there are, running around Paris? And how many who might have red hair, or wear a good violet velvet suit?”
Aramis glared more. Porthos wondered if D’Artagnan was intimidated by the glare. Himself, he had long ago learned that Aramis glared like this when he was thinking. Or rather, when he was forced to think along lines he did not wish to pursue.
After a long while, Aramis looked away, then raised his hand, slightly folded and, seeming to look intently at his impeccably manicured nails, said, “I do have some ability to sketch. I could draw the boy’s likeness, and copy it, so that each of us would have a quick drawing of him, to be used in asking people if they have seen him.”
“You’re a painter?” Porthos said.
Aramis looked up, a defensive expression in his gaze. “Not a painter,” he said. “I merely do a little sketching. In pen and ink or in coal. A very quick likeness. My mother . . .” He blushed and cleared his throat. “It is a pastime of my mother’s and she taught it to me when I was very young.”
“No doubt,” Athos said, drily with just a hint of humor in his voice indicating that he was joking. “Thinking that like all well-bred young ladies you’d need the art.”
Aramis blushed, the color coming to his face in a tide. He reached for his sword, but never allowed his hand to touch it, making himself drop his arm straight alongside his body, instead. “Do you wish me to do it, or not? Whatever you think of the ability, or even of how I came by it, doubtless it would be useful, would it not?”
“Please,” Porthos said, before Athos could open his mouth. “It would be very useful, yes. In fact, I don’t know how we can do it without your help.”
“Indeed,” D’Artagnan agreed, seemingly catching on.
“It would be very useful to all of us.”
They both glared at Athos, who only nodded and said, “Very useful.”
Bazin was sent to Aramis’s lodgings for paper and the sort of charcoal used for this work. While he was gone, the four friends debated what to do.
“The best we can do, I think,” Aramis said. “Is to ask at any lodgings around here where a noble family might be who has a son who looks like this. How far do you think he walked, Porthos?”
Porthos shrugged. “I got the impression he didn’t walk very long,” he said. “Half an hour at most. He sometimes said he had run the whole way and while . . .” He felt his throat close at the thought of how young the boy was. “He was very young and therefore full of energy, I don’t think he could have run much more than a quarter league, perhaps? ”
“So it would have to be lodgings hereabouts,” Athos said, thoughtfully. He’d placed himself at some distance from the corpse and leaning against a wall, looked at all of them detachedly. “Within the area that we, ourselves, live.”
“His suit is not very good,” Aramis said and, before Porthos could protest that it was fabric of the best quality, he added. “It is good velvet, I’ll grant you, and well cut. But it was not cut for him. It is too big in places and too small in others, and the breeches are much too short.”
“Sometimes,” D’Artagnan said. “Families of minor nobility do buy—”
“Used suits,” Aramis said, levelly. “Indeed, I am not a fool. I know that families do try to save money, particularly when the boy is young and still growing. But mind you, if they are minor nobility, or even”—he waved away an objection none of them had attempted to make—“if they are the highest nobility but he is the youngest of many boys and inherited his brothers’ clothing, then this would be a child who would be sent for errands everywhere. Everyone in this area would have seen him—from wine merchants to laundresses. In the country the youngest son would get charged with minding the livestock or exercising the horses. In the city, he’ll be sent for a bottle of wine for his father and a silk kerchief for his mother.”
“And so you suggest?” Athos asked.
“That we go out,” Aramis said. “I shall take Porthos, and we shall go to the palace. To the people we know there.” He allowed himself a quirk of the eyebrow. “From maids to noblemen, I’m sure if the family has gone to court at all someone will have seen the boy or heard of him. I’ll ask around, also, to theology professors and monks and see if anyone had taken him on to teach him, since his family intended him for the church. And I think you and D’Artagnan could perhaps ask around here? Within the distance a boy might run here? Porthos, where did you find him?”
“Down the alley,” Porthos said. “Past the smithy and the flowering roses that spill over the wall. There’s an inn there, or at least the back wall of it. The front door faces the street on the other side. He was sitting against the wall and he seemed to be dreaming with his eyes open.” He wished he knew, if it truly was poison, how long it would take to act, and how far the boy might have come. He didn’t know how to put these thoughts into words.
Looking down at the boy hurt. Though he’d been dead a little while now, and though he looked pale, it was not so much the look of one dead as of a child on the verge of falling asleep. The eyes looked up at the ceiling, blankly, and there was no sign of anguish. If one looked at him long enough, there was the feeling he would presently get up and smile and say wasn’t it a good joke, and hadn’t he fooled them all.
Porthos was used to his corpses having more blood on them, or more signs of violence. The boy looked like he’d been stunned, not killed. And yet Porthos was not a child. He knew what dead meant. This was no prank. There would be no waking up, no talking, no more fencing lessons. There would be nothing, now, for Guillaume.
With a pang, Porthos realized he would miss the boy, and let a heavy sigh escape him. As Aramis looked in his direction, he said, “
Sangre Dieu
” and for once Aramis did not scold him for the blasphemy, just inclined his head and said nothing.
At that moment, Bazin came in, with a wooden box which, upon opening, contained several sheets of paper and some dark sticks of what appeared to be charcoal of different tones. Porthos moved nearby to watch Aramis work. The younger man’s fingers moved quickly over the page, drawing a likeness of Guillaume with what appeared to Porthos like divine ability. The boy’s sharp nose emerged, and his slightly too square chin. You could tell if he’d grown to his full size and maturity he would one day have been a square-jawed man. You could see his face would have gained bulk and a certain solidity.
Porthos looked away as the scene had become inexplicably shaky. It was possible his eyes were full of tears, but he’d refuse to admit it. Instead, he swallowed hard, and swallowed again, and looked at the door, which was ajar, allowing only a sliver of light in.
Presently, he heard Aramis close his box of drawing materials, saw Bazin take it, and heard, without being fully able to understand it, Aramis give instruction to Bazin on where to find a coffin and Athos give instructions to the ever-silent Grimaud, his servant, on where to put the coffin in the wine cellar.
He wasn’t aware of the servants leaving, but they must have left because when Aramis tried to hand Porthos one of the pieces of paper with the boy’s picture, the servants were no longer there and D’Artagnan and Athos were standing by the door and looking back at Porthos with the worried expressions of people standing by a sick bed.
Porthos disciplined his face to show no emotion. So the boy was gone. So he would never grow up into the brave, determined man he’d promised to be. How many boys had died too young since the world had begun? It didn’t bear thinking about.
One glance at the picture Aramis had drawn showed him, as it were, Guillaume brought to life momentarily, with an expression of self-confidence in his eyes and the slightest of smiles on his lips.
Porthos rolled it carefully and held it in his hand. It didn’t bear looking at too much.
The Differences Between a Pedigree and a Baldric; The Differences Between Murder and Friendship
ARAMIS
knew Porthos well enough to be alarmed at his friend’s reactions. Grief for the boy, he could understand or almost understand. But there was a seething rage in Porthos’s look; a sense of fury being held barely in check.
It was not natural in Aramis, the turn of mind that rejoiced in the company of children or young adults. Rather, he considered them as yet not fully formed humans who must by the action of society and the guidance of a caring adult become polished exactly like a pebble becomes polished by the action of the sea. And while there were those who might value unpolished pebbles for their natural charm or their interesting surfaces, Aramis, with his elegant appearance, his careful education would take his jewels properly faceted or not at all.
So he didn’t understand, first of all, why Porthos would choose to associate with a juvenile of the species, rough and ready and unable to share interesting court gossip, or comment on Porthos’s choice of fashion. Part of this, of course, made him wonder if Porthos valued Aramis’s friendship quite as much as Aramis thought. And another part made him wonder if Porthos was the man he thought he was. Which, of course, bore an important weight on this subject, because his certainty that Porthos had
not
murdered the boy rested primarily on his knowledge of Porthos.
All this was in Aramis’s mind as—after waiting for what seemed like much too long for Porthos to change into his usual gold-hedged and gaudy musketeer’s uniform—he and Porthos left Porthos’s lodging through the garden and the back gate and started to the left towards the broad street that would take them to the royal palace. To the uneasiness of such thoughts, he must add the fact that Porthos was looking at Aramis out the corner of his eye and twirling his moustache now and then, not in the way he would when he was showing it off for maid or duchess, but in the way he did when deep in thought or faced with a puzzle he couldn’t decipher.
Aramis was ready to accept Porthos’s grieving over the boy—though the whole thing confused him. What he was not ready to do was accept that Porthos was also suspicious of Aramis. Suspicious of what, in God’s name? And why? Surely Porthos didn’t think Aramis had snuck up on the boy early morning and filled his confits with belladonna juice because the boy was a juvenile and therefore more trouble than profit in the world? If Aramis were to turn to that for reason, he’d be busy strangling babes in their cribs the whole livelong day.
They walked up the crowded street side by side, in the heavy foot traffic of late morning. Men and women either rushed home for a meal or hastened out and about their pursuits, assignations and meetings, duels and celebrations. Now and then the sound of horses’ hooves from behind made passersby rush onto the side of the road and flatten themselves against the wall—or against other passersby already flattened against the wall—while carriages with coats of arms on their doors, or horses’ rushing under the impulse of the riders’ whips passed them by.
It was after one of those moments of immobility, flattened side by side against the stone wall of what appeared to be a house of ill repute, while perfumed ladies in scant attire and their wine-soaked customers pressed against them, that Aramis decided he could take it no more.
“Porthos,” he said. “Why do you keep looking at me as though you suspected me of unnameable crimes?”
Porthos looked startled. He blew out breath under his abundant red moustache. “Me? Suspect you of crimes? Forbid the thought. I would never suspect a friend of a crime.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It is that my friends think other people would believe I was a criminal. That is what puzzles me. Not angers me, mind, for I’m not a wrathful man. But it astounds me.”
Porthos being subtle and trying to subtly give hint of offense would cause the same disquiet in most bosoms as a rabbit, its muzzle stained with blood, chasing a lion around. Aramis was human enough to be disquieted but even more human in feeling amused at Porthos’s attempts at hinting something.
“Porthos,” he said at last. “I don’t suspect you of anything. You know that! But you’re looking at me as if I’d killed your favorite hound and had designs on your horse.”
Porthos harrumphed, another behavior that didn’t come naturally to him. “You and Athos both surely sounded like you thought everyone at large would believe I might kill an innocent child to prevent my pedigree from being divulged. As though I could care less who my ancestors were, other than the most recent ones.” He made a sound in his throat as if spitting. “I didn’t know nobility, even of birth, much less nobility of mind and behavior, could be measured by how many noble ancestors a person could count. I always thought it was just what it was at the moment of birth.”
Oh. So that was what was working at Porthos. At least this, Aramis was prepared to understand. “I’ve always considered you noble enough,” Aramis said. “At least . . .”

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