Aramis frowned at the pages. If this was true, if the words on this page were copies of old records or recordings of old gossip, then Porthos’s ancestors had been born plebeian and grown rich through trade until, having enough money and having purchased enough lands, they had declared themselves noble and stopped the payment of the feudal labor tax and claimed ancient noble ancestors. In all this they had been aided by the great plague that had swept the land.
There were notes referring to the monasteries and village churches where the supposed originals of these records were kept.
“Porthos,” Aramis said and, without explanation, passed the sheets of paper to Porthos.
Porthos frowned at them, squinting, and flipping through the pages. Then he let the pages fall from his hand as if he’d lost all interest in them. He looked at the small corpse, his brow knit in incomprehension. “He had a recording of my family line? What does that mean? Is that how he found my true name.”
“Not unless the recording came with a drawing of you,” Aramis said acerbically. He repented it immediately as Porthos shook his head. Porthos wasn’t stupid, but he was, at the best of times, too literal. And now, in shock . . . “No, Porthos, think. He couldn’t have known it from that . . . What concerns me is what it says. About your ancestors. Did he tell you he knew that?”
“What?” Porthos asked, still frowning in confusion.
“That your ancestors had ennobled themselves more or less on their own fiat,” Athos said. He’d picked up the pages and was looking through them. “By stopping payment of the labor tax and claiming noble ancestors. Before that they were bourgeoisie engaged in . . . horse trade?”
Porthos smiled. It wasn’t an expression of joy but an almost sardonic pull of the lips in a face not accustomed to reflecting subtle emotions. “Ah. Yes. My ancestors were bourgeoisie. Does that make you despise me, Athos?”
Athos frowned, then sighed. “Porthos, we’ve been friends for years. There’s nothing that would make me despise you. I’m just saying that society at large might view your—”
“I don’t give a horse’s ass for society at large,” Porthos said, visibly startling Athos. Then sheepishly, added, “I’m sorry. I know I’m not as noble as you, Aramis. I’m probably not as noble as D’Artagnan and no one is as noble as Athos.” He said it without irony and probably did not mean the sting that made blood surge, visibly, in Athos’s face. “But why would this child have those papers? Who cares? Who, unless it is someone considering a marriage alliance with my family.”
Aramis gave up on finding anything else on the small corpse. No jewelry, no coin, nothing—nothing he could find, at least without a more thorough and tasteless search than he was willing to undertake. He stood up and looked at Porthos who, in turn, rose slowly to his feet, as though half aware of defending himself against an accusation none of them was going to voice.
“Porthos, any other nobleman, or almost any other nobleman would consider it a great shame to be known as having bourgeois blood. And you are known in the land for being a proud man who romances princesses and duchesses.”
Porthos shrugged. “All this”—he held up the pages— “can be found in our parish records, if you’re willing to dig. And it was two hundred years ago and more. Since then my ancestors have married women descended from noble families. In all, we probably have as many noble ancestors as anyone else, Athos always excepted, of course.”
“Porthos—” Athos said, a hint of warning in his voice.
“No, Athos, no. Truly. I can’t imagine your family marrying anything less than women with as full a pedigree and as great a noble background as yourself. You’re probably descended several times over from Caesar and Hercules and Hannibal and them all.”
A smile—one of the few, rare, untroubled smiles to grace Athos’s face—slid over the older musketeer’s lips and, his voice showing amusement and not offense, he said, “I doubt Hercules and Hannibal, but if I understand your meaning, you do not mean to give offense.”
“Not at all,” Porthos said. “And that”—he pointed at the sheaf of papers now in Athos’s hand—“doesn’t offend me, nor would it offend me if the word got out. Who in this land can point with certainty to a pedigree longer than two hundred years. Princes have less, if the mother line were investigated.”
“You’re missing the important part,” D’Artagnan said. He’d stood in the background, half in shadows, holding his hat to his chest as if he were at a funeral service. Now he spoke, his voice trembling a little and his dark eyes looking haunted by something he couldn’t quite name. “You’re missing the whole thrust of this, all of you. The thing is not whether Porthos is noble enough or not.” The young Gascon smiled, a sudden sardonic smile. “Coming from Gascony and from a family scarcely wealthier than the farmers around it, I can’t promise I’m even as noble as Porthos, so I’d be the last to condemn our friend’s ancestry. And I don’t know how the dead boy found it out, and that, too, is perhaps important but not now. The most important thing, right now, is what he hoped to gain by having it. It is clear . . .” D’Artagnan looked over Athos’s shoulder at the scribbled pages. “It is clear at least to me that this was written in a boy’s untutored hand. So chances are great he copied it himself. But why? And what did he hope to gain from it?”
As usual, D’Artagnan had gone straight to the heart of the matter. Aramis felt as if the ground moved under his feet, tilted, turned upside down. He did what he usually did when an idea was unbearable and he could not readily cover it in theological reasoning. “Are you suggesting,” he asked D’Artagnan, “that the boy tried to blackmail Porthos with this knowledge?”
D’Artagnan looked surprised. “I wasn’t suggesting it,” he said. “Merely asking why he would want to have Porthos’s genealogy in his pocket.”
“I was suggesting it,” Athos said. “Porthos, did he?”
“Athos, are you saying you suspect Porthos of killing the boy?” Aramis asked, his hand at his sword.
Before Athos could answer, Porthos did. “Don’t be a fool, Aramis. No one could accuse me of killing a . . . child. I like children.” He rubbed his huge fingers on his nose as if it itched. “Once, seems long ago, I wanted to get married and have many children. I don’t know how it got so far and me without children.” He seemed to fall in deep thought. “What I mean is, this life we live . . . what’s the future in it?”
Aramis, not daring to say more, still clenched his hand on the grip of his sword and glared his defiance at Athos.
But Athos only shook his head. “I never meant that. I would no more suspect Porthos of murdering a child than I would suspect any of us. No. What I mean is, was the child supposed to be found dead? Porthos says he found the boy collapsed behind some tavern. What if he had been found dead like that, and this the only thing in his pocket? Think you not that, to someone who doesn’t know Porthos, this”—he waved the written pages in the air—“might be believed to be enough cause for murder?”
Aramis opened his mouth, then closed it. He shook his head in turn. “Someone might think it was. Porthos, did the child ever talk to you of your family?”
Porthos sighed. “No. I might have told him things my father once or twice said while he was teaching me to use my sword, but that was about it. Other than that, my family was never mentioned.”
“So,” D’Artagnan said, his voice brisk, as if even he didn’t want to dwell too long on what he was saying, “what if someone else planted these pages on the boy and then poisoned him? So that when the boy was found everyone would think that Porthos did it?”
Possible Poisoners; The Impossibility of Tracing a Noble Boy in Paris; The Advantages of a Young Lady’s Accomplishment
"IT’S
a mare’s nest,” Porthos said, his mind thinking through everything that had happened. The boy being ill. His death. Then those papers. What could the papers mean? And what could they have to do with the boy’s death. “It has to be. None of it makes sense. Who would investigate my family line and copy it and put it in the boy’s pocket? And why would anyone kill him just to reach me?”
Aramis sighed. He looked tired. Truth be told, Porthos thought, Aramis hadn’t been the same these last couple of months, since his lover, Violette, had died. But he was starting to be more like himself, more . . . at ease with the world and those in it. Now, looking at Porthos, Aramis seemed haunted and hunted, like a man who sees something horrible pursuing him. It always worried Porthos when Aramis looked like this, because it was as good as betting that with any little push, anything gone the slightest bit wrong, Aramis would start talking of joining a monastical order again. And then for weeks he would stop drinking and wenching and swearing and wax all pious every time fighting was mentioned.
There had been several of these episodes, and usually they didn’t last longer than a couple of weeks, but however long they lasted, they were a great trial to Aramis’s friends. And it was best to stop them before they started. Only this time Porthos was not sure how to stop it.
“Aramis, I know you’re scared by something. I know you’re thinking something that frightens you, but I don’t know what it is nor how to make you stop thinking it.”
Aramis nodded. “I know. It is this—who would want to hurt you so badly that they were willing to use the boy? Who would want to get you condemned for murder so badly that they’d study your ancestry.”
“The Cardinal,” Athos said. “Only to be honest, his eminence normally targets heads higher than ours.”
“There are other people that Porthos might have made enemies of,” D’Artagnan said. “There are many he’s bested at duel. And there’s the husband of his . . . Duchess.”
Porthos caught the slight hesitation before D’Artagnan called Porthos’s lover a Duchess and of course D’Artagnan knew she was no such a thing. In the time he’d known the musketeers surely he’d caught on that Porthos’s loved lady, Athenais, was nothing but the wife of an accountant. Still, Athenais’s husband, Monsieur Coquenard, old and definitely not noble as he might be, did have power of a sort. Though he kept Athenais very short on the purse, it was rumored he had deep chests of coin somewhere. Which meant he could have bought conspiracy as surely as the Cardinal could have ordered it.
“All of these,” Aramis said, “are not so much a worry as his eminence. I do know there’s little chance of his being involved, but if there’s any chance at all, that means we must be very careful about all our movements in this matter. Twice already, by a bare thread, we’ve escaped coils that his eminence meant should kill us or stop us. Now . . .” Still looking too old and too worried, he hid his eyes with his hand for a moment, then let his hand drop. “We might not be so lucky.”
“So we investigate,” Porthos said, briskly, quickly, not wanting to give Aramis any chance to fall prey to that deep melancholy that, in him, could only be cured by sermonizing and the clinking of rosary beads. “We investigate as we must. Who better than us? It’s not as though it were the first time.”
On some level, he was aware of feeling grief and loss for the boy. For a moment, for a few weeks, the boy had supplied the illusion of having a son. He had made it less obvious what Porthos had sacrificed to the life of a musketeer. But now he was gone. Oh, Porthos wouldn’t and couldn’t pretend to the grief of a father. But grief it was, and no use denying it. “I want to find out who killed him, anyway. For his own sake,” he said. “Guillaume was . . . a good boy and would one day have been a great duelist. He didn’t deserve to die like this, with all of life untasted.”
It was the most eloquent condemnation he could manage, of the unknown person who’d killed the boy. He knew that Aramis or Athos, even D’Artagnan could have made a more moving speech, a more decisive case for catching the boy’s murderer.
But such as it was, it sufficed. It seemed to move the others to action.
“First,” Athos said, briskly, “we must find a place to put the body. It is no longer as hot as it was in the peak of summer, but it is still too hot to just leave him here. We might find his family quickly enough, but then we might not find it for a long, long time. The priest that Aramis knew, who could put coffins in his cool basement is himself dead
3
and therefore we can’t avail ourselves of his charity. My own cellar . . .” Athos shrugged. “Is cold enough for wine and at this time of the year it will do, if we can procure a coffin.”
“A coffin I can still arrange,” Aramis said. “I can direct Bazin to beg one from a monastery in town, and we can store the body in it.”
Athos nodded. “Good. That’s one problem taken care of. Of course, we’d better find the boy’s parents quickly nonetheless.”
“But how are we going to find his parents?” D’Artagnan said.
“By his name,” Aramis said. He flashed a superior smile. “We can ask around. D’Artagnan, we know you are a newcomer here, but the rest of us have many contacts in Paris and many people of whom we can ask the whereabouts of this family.”
D’Artagnan didn’t seem impressed, Porthos noted. In fact, one of the reasons he liked D’Artagnan, he decided, was that the young man seemed as little impressed with Aramis’s or Athos’s pronouncements as most other people were with Porthos’s.
“What if the boy used a false name? What if his family is truly not who he said it was? If the Cardinal is involved . . .” D’Artagnan said.