He noticed that Athos and Aramis had put their hands on their swords, and he, in turn, let his hand drift towards his. Only then did he think that he’d not heard anything from Mousqueton who’d gone down the stairs to open the door on the pounding.
And there was only one person that Mousqueton would let climb the stairs without at least making some remark . . . He thought this, just as Porthos, red hair in disarray, face almost as red from running as his hair, climbed the last step and emerged onto the broad room.
“I’ve found—” he said, and stopped, breathing hard, and bending over, hands on knees, as he recovered his breath.
“What?” Athos asked.
“Have you found the murderer?”
“Have you found the boy’s family?” D’Artagnan asked, while he thought that Porthos, who rarely breathed hard after duels, must have run all the way to tell them this.
Porthos looked at D’Artagnan and nodded, as he straightened. “I found where the boy came from. Not his family.” He frowned. “At least I don’t think so. I didn’t go in and ask. But I found where he . . . lived. And worked.”
“Worked?” Aramis asked. He stood frozen, as he had risen from the table, his hand now fallen beside his sword and he looked shocked at the thought that the boy might have worked.
“We were all fools, you know?” Porthos said. “I thought we were missing something, but it never occurred to me what it might be till I spoke to Athenais.”
“Athenais!” Aramis said.
And along Athos’s lips, a smile slid, as if wordlessly affirming he’d been right after all.
Porthos looked at Aramis and frowned. “Of course, Athenais. Where else would I have gone like that, without warning?”
“I didn’t know where you had gone,” Aramis said. “And I half suspected you might have been killed or kidnapped, or . . . somehow tricked into leaving the palace. You told me you’d wait for me in the courtyard.”
Porthos’s face fell. He looked remorseful and also upset at himself. He slapped his own forehead with some force. “Indeed I did, Aramis. I’m sorry. Did I worry you?”
“I knew you were too evil to die that easily,” Aramis said, and looked intently at his nails, as if examining them for imperfections. As if Porthos’s disappearance had left him quite unmoved.
Porthos smiled, not at all taken in, then frowned, in obvious contrition. “I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean to wander away. I didn’t realize I’d done it until I was almost at Athenais’s home, and then it seemed a little silly to go back. I didn’t even know why I was doing it, you know, except, as Hermengarde—your excellent Hermengarde, Mousqueton—” He nodded to his servant who smiled. “As she was going about the rounds of making sure no one in the palace had heard of the boy or seen him, all I could think of was that she wouldn’t find anything. I just had a feeling. And such feelings in me usually mean my mind knows something I don’t know.”
“Your mind cannot know something you don’t know,” Aramis said, giving up the examination of his nails. He sounded irritated, which—D’Artagnan thought—was the way Aramis normally sounded around Porthos. “Your mind is yourself.”
Porthos shook his head. “No, Aramis,” he said. “
Your
mind is
yourself
. My mind . . . Well . . . Sometimes I think I do half my thinking with my elbows or perhaps my toe-nails. And they don’t always talk to my mind, you see?”
“Nonsense. No one can think except with their mind and—”
“Well, Aramis,” Porthos said. “Sometimes I know things my mind can’t put into words. And sometimes I’m not even sure what I know until I have talked it over with someone.”
“So you went to speak to Athenais,” D’Artagnan said.
“Yes.”
“And what did the incomparable Athenais reveal?” Athos asked.
Porthos turned towards Athos quickly, as if suspicious of irony in the older musketeer’s tone, but on looking at Athos, and, apparently, finding only honest curiosity in his gaze, he sighed and shook his head. “The incomparable— and she is that, Athos—” he said, as Athos nodded, “Athenais told me that we’d been overlooking a very important chance that the boy might have lied to us.”
“Nonsense,” Aramis said. “You’re losing your wits. I told you from the beginning that it was possible he was lying to us. That was why I thought I should do a drawing of him. So that we were not dependant on the name Guillaume Jaucourt to find him. I thought there was a good chance the name was false.”
“Yes, but none of us thought of looking beyond the name,” Porthos said.
“What do you mean?” Aramis asked. “You speak in riddles.”
“It is plain.”
“I don’t see how,” Athos said.
“Really, Porthos,” D’Artagnan said, trying to sound more reasonable than his two aggrieved and older friends. “You’ve told us nothing except that we should look beyond the name. In what way do you mean?”
“Well,” Porthos said. “What else could be false?”
“I knew it,” Aramis said. “He was a plant by the Cardinal. ”
“No,” Porthos said. “Or at least . . . I don’t know so yet. But he was not what he said he was. Athenais said that any plebeian boy can learn to act noble with a little wit and a little practice. And that started me thinking . . . And she said I should go and ask near where I found him. Just ask people in the neighborhood. That they were more likely to give me an answer than anyone else was.”
“So, what was the boy’s real name?” Aramis asked.
Porthos shrugged. “Guillaume. Just . . . Guillaume. No one seems to know a family name for him. He doesn’t seem to have a family. He lived with his sister in the tavern down the street, the tavern against whose wall he was leaning. The Hangman. We rarely go there because—”
“The wine is overpriced,” Athos said.
“And the proprietress could glare a hole in a stone wall,” Aramis said.
Porthos nodded. “That. And that’s why we failed to know the boy. Apparently he and his sister help at the tavern. Fetching and carrying and picking up things . . . you know, as young people do.”
“So he was in fact a street urchin,” Aramis said.
Porthos shrugged. “Something like it, though the tavern keeper seemed to give them a place in his stables to sleep and at least some food.” He frowned. “Everyone seemed to think they worked too hard, everyone told me how hard they worked.” He looked disturbed by the thought.
D’Artagnan nodded. Of course, work was the normal state of childhood. In his own father’s domain, the farmer’s children started helping in the fields as soon as they could. And he, himself, though it couldn’t be called exactly working, had been taught to hunt as early as he could be trusted to sit astride a horse and hold a bow. And in a way, that was a nobleman’s work. At least the part of it that involved keeping beasts from the fields his peasants tended. And he knew girls learned to cook and tend house from the moment they learned to walk.
He’d grown up with all that and it seemed to him quite normal, but it wasn’t till he’d come to Paris that he’d seen true work among children. Children who rose early and worked all day and were only allowed a respite from the work late at night and for a few hours, till dawn brought another round of work.
He saw them everywhere, stoking the fires at forges and holding horses for people, and running errands for various masters through the streets of town. He saw them, seemingly, always working. Never resting. And all of them had a hungry, restless look. But hungry most of all.
He’d heard from Porthos that Mousqueton had been one of those children—a skinny street brat, driven by hunger to try to steal from the then fencing master. Looking at the large young man it was hard to believe. And Mousqueton himself had told him a confused story of being left orphaned so young he didn’t remember his parents, only fending for himself on the streets of Paris.
This urban poverty and the children who endured it seemed to D’Artagnan far more wretched creatures than his working, but contented neighbors in Gascony. At least most children there lived with relatives. And at the peak of winter, when nothing grew, they got to sit by the fire with their parents and while away the dark days in peace.
Coming out of his thoughts, he realized that the others were well away into discussing something.
“So, we’ll go to the tavern,” Porthos said. “And ask.”
“It’s not that easy, and you know it,” Aramis said. “If it were that easy, you’d have braved it yourself, going into the tavern and asking questions on your own. But it is not. We can’t walk in and start asking about the boy without their suspecting that there is something wrong and some reason for strangers to ask.”
“We’ll say that some stranger asked us to look,” Porthos said. “We can hint it was the boy’s father without saying it.”
“What if they know who the boy’s father is?” Athos asked.
“Unlikely,” Porthos said. “Boys who work like that, at that young an age . . .” He shrugged. “If he had a living father, somewhere, he’d have gone to his father, or given him the money. There would have been some . . . presence of his father in his life.”
“He might have run away from the provinces to come to the city,” Aramis said. “His parents might still be there, somewhere, in the country.”
“Indeed,” Porthos said. “But if so, it is unlikely the tavern keeper will know of it. And if he ran away bringing his sister with him, then surely there was some great reason to run away. Which means that he would not have told the tavern keeper of his parents.”
“True,” Aramis said. “First of all we must use tact in asking.”
“And that,” Porthos said, “is why I didn’t go in on my own. I thought I’d need tact, and immediately thought of the three of you.”
Sometimes, D’Artagnan thought, it wasn’t easy to tell if Porthos was being serious or ironic. But he guessed at serious, in this case, because Porthos seemed genuinely pleased at the thought of his friends coming with him to the tavern and helping him ask questions.
“There’s only one thing,” Athos said. “We can’t quite eliminate the chance that the Cardinal is involved in this.”
“But if the boy is a simple tavern boy,” Aramis said. “Surely—”
“There’s nothing sure in this,” Athos said. “Yes, he’s just a plebeian boy, but how many times has the Cardinal not reached into the lowliest ranks to get his spies, his agents, his enforcers? Granted, Rochefort is as noble as I am, if perhaps poorer. But there are others . . .”
They all nodded. They’d run into others. Grocers and prostitutes, beggars and wine sellers who, surprised by the condescension of the Cardinal in even speaking to them, were more than willing to do the great man’s bidding. It could almost be bet that the lower the origin of the recruit, the more slavishly he’d do everything that the Cardinal asked.
“But . . .” Athos said. “Whether the Cardinal’s or someone else’s, the truth is that he must have been in someone’s pay.”
“Why?” Porthos asked, frowning.
“Two things. If he were not, there is no possibility he could have—on his own—afforded such a nice suit as the one he had on. And neither would there be any reason for him to have a list of your ancestry in his pocket.”
“Right,” Porthos said. And frowned. “At least no reason we know.”
“If you’re going to tell me again that your mind knows things you don’t know . . .” Aramis said.
Porthos shrugged. “Not anything that defined, no. It’s just that . . . well . . . there might be more complex reasons than we know now.” He frowned. “Or at least . . . We usually end up finding that there are, don’t we?”
As he spoke, he turned and started down the stairs, followed by Athos and Aramis. D’Artagnan followed, thinking that Porthos was right about that. Around the four of them, particularly when murder was involved, things were usually stranger than they seemed to be at first.
The Hangman; Another Nobleman; A Young and Quiet Girl
AS
soon as they entered the Hangman—its name represented by a leaping man holding a noose and looking almost maniacally inclined to mirth—Athos knew why they didn’t frequent it much. It wasn’t so much that the wine was overpriced. It was more like the whole tavern was out of the musketeers league.
While the Cardinal, in a fit of passion, had been known to declare that no drinking spot or bawdy house in town was free of the scourge of the drunken, brawling, whoring musketeers, he was in fact wrong. The more expensive bawdy houses were very free of them, as were the more expensive taverns, like the Hangman, with its clean tables, its well-scrubbed walls, the candles that burned wax and not some smoky mixture of tallow, and its sour-faced proprietress behind the bar, looking menacingly at the four men with their uniforms and swords, as they came in.
A jovial fat man—possibly her husband—scrubbing one of the nearest tables, looked up at them as they entered, too, and his face did a quick succession of expressions, from surprised to worried to frantically jovial, the last the expression of a man who does not wish to see a brawl start in his tavern. “Sirs,” he said, looking up. “Glad to see you. Find yourself a place to sit. Amelie!” This called over his shoulder towards the shadows and definitely not in the tone he would dare address his imposing wife. “Amelie, where have you got to, girl?”