Outside, on the covered portico of the imposing building, Athenais was speaking sharply to her attendants.
“But Madame Coquenard,” the young and pimply clerk was saying, “the carriage is waiting. With the horses. You cannot mean to walk home.”
“No,” Athenais answered, imperious. “Not that it would be any concern of yours if I did, but I just recalled that my friend, Armandine, is ill and she lives just a few doors down. I will go and see if I can help her in any way. And then I will ask her husband to have a carriage take me home.”
“But madam,” the clerk said. “Why can’t we wait?”
“Because I have asked you not to wait,” Athenais said. “I don’t want Armandine to feel that she has exposed my people to inconvenience or that I have gone to great trouble to visit her. Go home, boy. You too Catherine.”
“But, Monsieur Coquenard—” the young man said.
“Is my business and not yours. My husband knows of my works of mercy. He has yet to object to them.”
Finally the two attendants left. Athenais turned and walked slowly down the steps, and then started down the street. Porthos waited to see the Coquenard carriage— unmarked and probably bought used, or else received in security for a debt—drive by, with the two befuddled attendants riding in front with the driver. And then he waited a little longer before taking off in pursuit of Athenais.
With his long stride, he caught up with her shortly enough, just as Athenais took a sudden turn into an alley. He went after her and, a little while in, in the darkness of evening, he caught up with her, clutched at her arm. “Athenais,” he said.
“Shh,” she said, without turning. “Just a little while farther on, Porthos.”
A little while farther on turned out to be five minutes of hard walking, after which Athenais stopped at the door of what looked like a very small, modest house. Fishing in her sleeve, she brought out a key, and opened the door. She went in and closed it, but not all the way.
Porthos followed. Inside it was a one-room dwelling, of the sort that most working men in Paris lived in, save that this one was freestanding and not a part of a larger room. Like many such dwellings—such as the one in which D’Artagnan lived—it was let furnished and therefore it contained a small wooden table and two chairs, and a bed with a thin mattress and a blanket. There was no fire in the hearth and the place smelled cold and unused, if also very clean.
Athenais turned, and removed her wrap. By the abated light of day coming through the single window which looked onto what seemed to be a small, walled garden, she appeared very beautiful and far younger than Porthos knew her to be. He felt as if he were looking at Athenais as she’d been when she’d married Monsieur Coquenard— seventeen-year-old Athenais, devoid of artifice or fear.
“Athenais,” he said, as he flung the door shut, and pushed the bolt to close it. He advanced towards her, and crushed her in his arms, feeling her blessedly warm and alive in his. He lowered his mouth to hers and kissed her, his hunger for her body augmented by his feeling that he was living a life that was no life and that he needed . . . something he couldn’t even name. Warmth or nourishment or life itself.
They were carried on the wave of his hunger, Athenais letting him do as he pleased, until the wave crested and ebbed, and they found themselves on the thin mattress, almost naked—he was wearing only his shirt and she a sort of petticoat for which he didn’t know the proper name— and sated, in each other’s arms.
It was then that the little house and its furnishings bothered him. “Athenais,” he said. “Whose home is this?”
She sat up so slowly that she didn’t break his hold on her and started, composedly, as though this were the most logical thing to do, to comb through her disarrayed hair. She removed the pins, then rebraided her hair. Holding the hair pins in her mouth, she spoke nonetheless clearly enough. “Mine,” she said. And then. “Or Monsieur Coquenard’s. We acquired it in a deal some time ago, and it’s been leased, but the occupant moved out. I had the key with me, as I meant to inspect it before leasing it again. I didn’t mean to come here today, but I’d put the key in my sleeve-pouch and meant to come here maybe tomorrow. When I saw you in church, it seemed . . . providential.”
“Um . . .” he said, and leaned forward to kiss the neck she’d bared in pulling her hair up to braid.
She giggled at being tickled with his beard. “I’ll never get my hair braided properly this way,” she said. “And the servants will wonder how I got so disarrayed in looking after Armandine.”
“Is your friend truly ill?” Porthos asked.
“She gave birth this week,” Athenais said, her hands moving very rapidly and braiding her hair by touch more accurately than many a woman could do it in front of a mirror. “A boy.”
“Athenais . . .” Porthos said.
Athenais turned, concerned. One of the things that Porthos liked about her was that even when he couldn’t put what he felt, or what was bothering him, into words, she nonetheless seemed to catch the edge of his worry, the crux of his sadness. She turned to look at him, and she let go of her hair, as her gaze softened. She took the pins out of her mouth and kissed him, a quick, concerned peck on the cheek. “Porthos, we can’t. You know we can’t. How would I explain it to my husband? He no longer can . . .”
Porthos shook his head. “I know,” he said. “But I wish we could. I wish we could get ourselves . . . well . . .” He shook his head again, as if to clear it, but the images only came rushing into it more—the images of a life that could never be his. “I wish we could have our own home,” he said. “Even if it were as modest as this. And two boys and three girls.” He thought about it a minute. “No, too many girls. What would we do with them all? How would we find them all dowries. Four boys and a girl.”
Athenais giggled. “I see you’ve given the matter a great deal of thought,” she said, her eyes wishful and grave. “Pray tell, why must we have girls at all?”
“Well,” Porthos said. He chewed on his lip with concentration. Right then that imaginary family seemed the most important thing in his world, and it blocked out his thoughts of the dead boy. “I want at least one daughter who will be as beautiful as her mother.”
“Oh, Porthos,” she said, in the soft tone women use when they don’t believe a compliment, and yet know that the speaker means it. Her hair, which she’d never pinned, had flowed free of the braid and now covered her shoulders in red gold waves.
With the petticoat, which was a skirt only, leaving her top completely bare, the lose waves of her hair looked like the veil of a saint. No. Not a saint. A pagan goddess. No saint would go about bare breasted. “Not unless there were swords in it.”
Athenais blinked. “Swords?”
“On the saints’ breasts,” Porthos said. “It’s the only time bare breasts are allowed in church.”
This brought a peal of throaty laughter from Athenais. She grabbed his hand and forced him to open it, palm up, and put her hair pins in it, while she started braiding her hair again.
“Madam, do I look like your vanity, or your maid?”
“You look like a man with great big hands, who can hold my hair pins,” she said, and helped herself to a hair pin to hold her hair in place.
Porthos sighed. Athenais looked over her shoulder. “What is wrong? None of this is like you—coming to see me before dinner time, nor being so oddly sad and concerned. ”
Porthos sighed again. “It’s the boy,” he said.
“A boy?” Athenais looked genuinely surprised, then nodded, as if she’d finally understood. “The Gascon?”
“No, no. A real boy. Twelve. He approached me, months ago, and . . . he knew my true name, Athenais! And he asked me to teach him sword fighting.”
“And you,” she said. “Very promptly thrashed him for thinking you were a proscribed nobleman and then refused to have anything else to do with him.”
“Athenais!”
“No. Of course not.” She looked as if she were about to say something else, but had stopped herself in time. “You gave in to his blackmail.”
“It wasn’t blackmail, Athenais. He was just a boy. Twelve. A stripling. And what he wanted was to learn sword fighting. What did I lose by teaching him? And he was good too.”
Athenais sighed. She retrieved the last hairpin from his hand, and put it in her hair, and rose. “Was good?
Was?
Porthos . . . what happened?”
It all came spilling out, simple descriptions of what happened because Porthos had never learned the knack of embellishing a story and so told things sequentially, as they’d occurred. When he talked about his genealogy in the boy’s pocket, Athenais had been reaching for her dress. She let her hand fall. “It was blackmail, Porthos.”
“Why? Why would it be blackmail?” Porthos asked. “I’d already given in to what he wanted, which was to teach him to fight. Why else would he have my genealogy in his pocket? What could he make me do with it?” Porthos shrugged. He’d told Athenais about the genealogy and about what it revealed. “You see, I know my family is not as noble as yours, but—”
Athenais laughed. “Porthos. My father married me to an attorney of no nobility at all. As his third wife. Porthos. Don’t speak of genealogy and papers and traditions.”
“Yes,” Porthos said. “But the thing is that I never cared. There’s Athos, noble as Scipio, and he doesn’t care if my ancestors were merchants, does he? He’s as much my friend as he’s Aramis’s.”
Athenais had thrown her dress over her head and now looked firmly trapped by it. Porthos knew that she normally had a maid or two to help her dress. He hastened to fulfill the role of the maid, and she let him lace the dress up her back. He’d never done this job, but he’d done its reverse often enough. He told her how they’d looked in the palace and Athos and D’Artagnan were canvassing the neighborhoods for someone who might know the boy’s family. “Only, no one ever heard of Jaucourt as a family name and, Athenais, what if we don’t find them? What if they’re in agony looking for their boy, and he’s lying dead, and they’ll never know it? And what if I find them and I have nothing but this dismal news to give them?”
Athenais was grave. She turned around and looked seriously at Porthos. “He told you he was noble,” she said. "And that his family name was Jaucourt?”
Porthos nodded.
Athenais pursed her lips together and looked at him, with that expression she had that made him feel like he was a small child under the serious scrutiny of a stern governess.
She turned away from him and reached for her veil on the table and picked it up, then put it down again. “Porthos, have none of your friends considered . . .”
“Oh,” Porthos aid. “Aramis thought the boy might have been sent to me as a ploy of the Cardinal’s, that the papers in his purse, and his having been killed might all be part of a ploy to get me taken for murder.”
Athenais turned around. She looked more serious than ever. “Yes, all that might be true, and more besides, but has none of you considered that he might have given you a false name?”
“A false name?” Porthos said. “Oh, yes, we considered it. That is why Aramis made drawings, when we went to ask for him, in case he had a different name.”
“But you’re looking for him in the palace?” Athenais said. “And where noblemen lodge? It has not occurred to you, my dear, that he might not be a nobleman at all? Just a street urchin the Cardinal employed in this? Or someone did?”
“But he . . .” It had never occurred to Porthos. And now it did, he felt cold and lost. Curse it all. If Guillaume wasn’t even a nobleman, then it meant he could be anyone at all in Paris. How were they to find his family. “But he behaved as a young gentleman,” he said.
Athenais nodded. “Manners are a thing anyone can pick up with just a little observation.”
“But . . . Athenais! How am I to find who he is, then?”
Athenais tilted her head a little. “I would go near where you found him. And start looking there.”
“Near where I found him . . .” Porthos said.
Athenais wrapped her veil around her head. “And now if you’d escort me to Armandine’s home, so I don’t have to brave the streets of Paris alone, I’ll make up something to account for my delay. That I was moved to go back and pray, perhaps.”
As she locked the door behind them, and he waited beside it, she said, “You know, I could hide the fact that this house hasn’t been let. I could hide it in the accounts. My husband would never know. And we could have it.”
“Why?” Porthos asked. “We have the rope ladder.”
“And every servant waiting for the bed to creak. This could be ours, just ours.”
He nodded saying nothing. He wished it was really theirs and their true home. Aloud, he said, “I found the boy lying against the back wall of a tavern.”
“Then that’s where I would look first,” she said. “That tavern and the immediate neighborhood.”
News at Last; The Strange Knowledge of Porthos’s Mind; Suits and Genealogy
D’ARTAGNAN
stood up at the sound of running steps on the stairs. In his mind, he formed a picture where some intruder had pushed past Mousqueton and was now rushing up the stairs to do them who knew what mischief.