Athos answered just as seriously, seemingly making no allowances for his interlocutor’s young age. “Because I know Guillaume got money. I also know he didn’t have it with him when . . . when he left here five days ago. At least I don’t think he did. Did he, Amelie?”
The girl looked at him a long time, then, after a while, nodded. “No,” she said. “He didn’t take the money. There were two double handfuls”—she showed with her little hands—“of gold coins. His hands, bigger than mine. And he hid them in the stable. There’s a place in the upstairs where a board is lose, and he hid them there. But, you know, he must have come back for them, because when I went up there and checked yesterday, it was gone. I didn’t want you to know in case you thought he had done something bad with the money. Only he wouldn’t, you know? He wouldn’t do anything but what he said, and get a better life for us. And if he did something you don’t like—”
“He didn’t do anything I don’t like,” Porthos said, feeling tears come to his eyes. He wished Guillaume had grown. He wished in the course of a long life there would have been the time for him to disagree with Guillaume on some of Guillaume’s choices—his choice of profession or his choice of attire or his choice of bride. As it was, there was nothing, nothing, now for him to disagree with Guillaume on.
And the money was gone. Who could have known the money had been there at all? “When did you see the money last, Amelie?”
“At night, when I went into the stable to sleep,” she said.
“Could anyone else have heard it or seen where the money was?”
“No,” Amelie said. “No. Guillaume made sure all the grooms were asleep. They slept elsewhere, anyway, in a room at the back. All of them were asleep, and we were all alone.”
“No one could have come or gone?” Porthos asked.
Amelie thought. “No. No one. The part of the stable we sleep in is a division at the back. The hay is kept upstairs, and that’s where we sleep. On the bottom there’s only one horse, and that’s Martin’s own horse.”
“And could Martin have come in?”
“No, because when Guillaume showed me the money, the horse wasn’t there yet, and the horse still wasn’t there when we went to sleep.”
Porthos looked at Athos and Athos back at Porthos. Athos was frowning. “Was it very late?”
“Oh, yes. So late.”
“Does Martin often stay out very late?” Athos asked.
The girl nodded. “He’ll leave after he’s done serving in the tavern, and he’ll stay away for hours and hours and hours.” She frowned. “Madam says he goes to the whores, but then she calls me a whore, too, so I’m not sure what she means or if she knows where he goes.”
Madam. In Porthos’s head, an idea was forming, but he didn’t know how to prove it, even if it were true. He looked up, meeting Athos’s gaze and realizing that both of them were thinking the same thing.
Aramis and D’Artagnan, the cunning ones, looked blank for once. Perhaps, Porthos thought, it was that he and Athos were the two older ones here, and had had more time to observe the workings of unhappy marriages.
“Softly,” Athos said. “Softly, Porthos. I’ll go and get mine host out on some pretext.”
“But . . . how can we prove it?” Porthos said and it came out half as a complaint and half as a wail of protest.
“With luck,” Athos said. “With a lot of luck.”
A Husband’s Knowledge; A Wife’s Rage; A Daughter’s Duty
“
BUT
. . . I don’t understand any of this,” the hosteler, Martin said, as he stood before them, in the afternoon sun, rubbing his head as if it hurt him. He looked from one to the other of them. “I’m sorry, but are you gentlemen amusing yourselves at my expense? It is a fantastical story.”
“And yet it is true,” Porthos said.
“But . . . Guillaume . . . dead?”
Porthos looked down at Amelie, who had given a sudden shout at first hearing of her brother’s death and who was now crying silently. He put his hand on her head, and his hand more than covered her small head. He petted her gently, as one would pet a disturbed animal. He looked back up at the hosteler, and nodded.
“And what’s all this of five hundred louis d’or? It can’t be. How could he gets his hands on that much money?”
“It was—” Porthos started to say.
“A legacy,” Aramis interrupted. He looked at Porthos. “A distant relative who had no need for them any longer had her jewels sold and left the money to Guillaume.”
“Oh. But then . . . Guillaume found his family?”
Porthos sighed. He transferred his hold from Amelie’s head to her shoulders, and rested his hand there. “I was Guillaume’s father,” he said.
“Oh,” Amelie said, looking up. “He said you were a musketeer and the most wonderful sword fighter in the whole world. And he said you could never support him in style, but he was sure you would recognize him, because he’d been to your native village and you . . . not all your . . . uh—” she came to a sudden stop and blushed dark.
“Not all my—?” Porthos prompted.
“I’m afraid you’ll be angry,” Amelie said.
“With Guillaume’s sister?” Porthos said. “Never.”
“Oh. Then. He said not all of your grandfather’s grandfather’s were noble, and that you would recognize him even though he was the son of . . . even though mother wasn’t noble.” She looked at Porthos, attentively. “Would you have?”
“Yes,” Porthos said. “Yes, I would have.” On impulse, he picked the little girl up. She was, he was sure, the hosteler’s daughter. At any rate, being years younger than Guillaume, she could never be his own. But she was all he had left of the love of his youth and of his son. The daughter of one, the sister of the other.
“I still don’t understand,” Martin said, looking from the little girl to Porthos, then back at the little girl. “You say someone poisoned Guillaume and took his money, but this I can’t understand. Because the stable boys wouldn’t have given Guillaume any food, save maybe if they put the poison in his drink when he went drinking with them, which I think he did once or twice.”
“Not that day or the night before that day,” Amelie said. “He didn’t go anywhere. He talked to me and that was all.”
“But then . . . who can have killed the child and stolen the money?” Martin asked, scratching at his head, his face the picture of astonishment. He looked at them, one at a time again. “Are you sure this is not a joke you’re playing on me?”
“
Sangre Dieu
,” Porthos said. “How can it be a joke when a child is dead? No. It is not a joke and none of us is laughing.”
“Perhaps . . .” Athos said. “Perhaps you can do me a very great favor?”
Martin blinked. “Anything, Monsieur Musketeer, but . . .”
“Is there a place your wife hides money? A place she thinks you don’t know about?”
Martin looked blank for a moment, but then a fleeting smile crossed his lips. “Oh yes,” he said. “Provided I remember not to take too much or too suddenly, she just thinks she forgot how much she had.”
Porthos had seen this sort of arrangement many times and now kicked himself for not having thought of it before Athos did. Of course the wife would have a place to hide money that she considered secure. All the wives of profligate husbands given to drinking and consorting with women of easy virtue did. And of course her husband would have found it out years ago. All the husbands did. As long as you were careful to only milk the cow a little, the game could go on for years.
“Have you taken any money out of there recently?” Porthos asked.
Martin shook his head slowly. “Oh, not in a month, at least,” he said. “I try, you see, not to hit it too often, or she would find out.” He sighed. “It’s not that she’s a bad woman, you know, but she is, of herself, so cheerless and so little in need of company that she doesn’t understand that I require every once in a while to go elsewhere and to be with people who laugh and drink.” He frowned. “But what can any of this have to do with the boy and his money?”
“I would like you to go to that place now, with all of us attending, all of us watching,” Athos said.
“But . . . why? It’s in the tavern, you know? If she sees me go there and sees that I know her place she’ll only change it.”
“That . . .” Athos shook his head. “It won’t matter. Trust me. It’s the only way for you to understand and the only way for us to know for sure what happened.”
At this, Martin’s eyes flew wide, and he stared at Athos. “Here, what are you saying? Are you saying that Josiane murdered the boy? For money? It’s monstrous. She’s been my wife for twenty years. She would never—”
Athos straightened his back, his face a mask of perfect gravity. “If we go to the hiding place and you find nothing, I will accept I was wrong and I will apologize for having slandered your wife.”
Martin’s face hovered between shock and anger, but anger won out. “Oh, you will, by God,” he said. “You will beg my pardon and Josiane’s too. I know she has a temper and that, for reasons I don’t understand, she doesn’t like poor Amelie, but just for that, it is no reason to think that she would murder Guillaume. And Guillaume, yet, whom she didn’t care about one way or another, save that he helped bring heavy things into the tavern and looked after the guest’s horses.”
Martin wiped his hands to his voluminous apron. “You will be proven wrong, by God, follow me and you’ll see.” And full of his own righteous certainty, he marched towards the tavern.
The tavern was almost empty. Only one table—at a corner—was taken by a group of four strangers who were eating their midday meal in silence. Martin’s wife, behind the counter, was wiping it with vigor.
As they came into the tavern, with Porthos still carrying Amelie, she darted the girl a venomous look. “There you are, you laze about,” she said. “Again in the company of men. I don’t suppose it has occurred to you to go to the laundress as I sent you, to find—”
Her recrimination stopped, mid sentence while Martin walked in and walked straight towards the fireplace. When her voice resumed, the tone was the same, but the target different. “Martin, what are you doing? What do these men want?”
Martin, on a righteous mission of his own, ignored her. He marched straight to the fireplace, and grabbed at a certain brick that didn’t seem to protrude any more than any others. The sound of brick scraping on brick could be heard, as he moved it slightly back and forth.
“Martin, what are you doing?” his wife asked and, leaving the counter, came running towards them to grab onto Martin’s arm. “What are you doing? Have you gone mad?”
But he only shook his head and continued pulling. From where Porthos was, he could see that his face was set in an expression of anger, still, and his eyes burning with the certainty of his own righteousness.
“Martin!” his wife said, and now started raining blows on his arm and shoulder, blows he ignored as though they were no more than the sting of a wayward mosquito.
And then the brick came loose, and there was a sound of metal, and a rain of gold came spilling out of the hole in the wall, to tinkle on the floor, calling even the attention of the guests in the corner.
The woman wailed, and Martin stood, staring at the hole and at the gold. He put his hand into the hole in the wall and brought it out covered in coins, which he allowed to fall between his fingers to the floor, as though they didn’t mean anything or he wasn’t sure exactly what they were for.
Then he turned to his wife, his gaze still angry, but now burning with something else. “You,” he said. “You killed the boy. I could take your coldness. I could take the fact that you don’t love me. But you killed the boy? Why, Josiane, why?”
She looked at her husband, her face rigid, and then broke suddenly in a deep sob. She stumbled towards the nearest table and dropped onto a bench next to it. “You only married me because my parents owned the tavern,” she said. “I saw even then, how you looked at every pretty woman who passed by. And I thought it didn’t matter, because we’d have children, and I’d be the mother of your children. But it never happened. And then you had your whore come and live here, already with child, and then you had this other one”—She pointed at Amelie—“with her. And then Guillaume was just as bad as you are. That brat, always looking here and there, and knowing everything . . .
“I poisoned the slut. Five years ago, I poisoned the slut, and everyone thought she had died of a fever. The nightshade out back, my mother always said not to get any leaves in anything by accident, because it makes you burn up inside, and I gave it to her, because I knew you were visiting her every night, there, in the stable, like animals, and she was swelling up with another of your bastards, yet again. And I gave it to her and she died, but then you just started going to other women. And you wouldn’t come home till near morning, and drunk, and I thought, I thought . . .” She shook her head. “I got up, on Sunday, late at night, and I went into the stable, to see if you’d taken your horse, or if perhaps you’d gone out on foot, and I saw your brats with all this money, and he was talking about how they’d live like royalty. And I was sure it wasn’t money come through in a good way, and all I could think is that you’d leave with them. There was enough gold there to buy another tavern, if you wanted. And I thought you’d leave with them, and I’d be alone, and I didn’t even have any children. So I poisoned your bastard.”