The Musketeer's Apprentice

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.

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.