“And we prove him innocent,” D’Artagnan said. “Others among us have been accused of murder before,” he looked at Aramis. “Surely the fact that Mousqueton is a servant doesn’t make him any less our responsibility.”
“No,” Aramis said, doubtless remembering the circumstances under which he’d been suspected of murder, circumstances far more incriminating than even Mousqueton’s. [1] “No. Perhaps more our responsibility, since he’s more defenseless than we are.”
“Yes,” Porthos said. “We are his only family, you know? He was an orphan when I took him into my service.”
“Well, then,” Athos said, and though he heard the amusement in his own voice, he knew he was in dead earnest. “Let it be for our servants as it is for us. We’ll prove him innocent or die trying. One for all-”
“And all for one,” his friends answered in a single voice.
The Antechamber of Monsieur de Treville; The Inadvisability of Tempting a Musketeer; The Limits of the Possible
PORTHOS didn’t doubt that Monsieur de Treville would be able to do something about Mousqueton. After all, Monsieur de Treville, captain of the musketeers, often stood somewhere between a father and a confessor to his musketeers. He was the one who got them pardons from the King when they were arrested mid duel. He was the one who protected them from trouble when their amorous adventures landed them in hot water.
And he had been the one who, those many years ago when Aramis killed a man in a duel with Porthos as his second, had looked after them and given them a place to hide and identities to hide under. He had also, through the various travails in which the four friends found themselves involved, stood by their side and protected them. Porthos was sure that Monsieur de Treville could do something.
But when they arrived, the antechamber was crowded. Oh, it was normally crowded, serving the musketeers as gathering place, sports chamber and training room. The entire room-a huge, well-proportioned room of Italianate influence, furnished with fine mosaic floors and columned expanse-was the setting for impromptu mock duels-battles for position and place-in which the musketeers tested their mettle and fought with such abandon that a stranger might imagine they wished to kill each other. On the stairs, the more adventurous ones fought, gaining and losing a step or two, at the risk of eye or ear or limb.
Normally when in the antechamber, Porthos, Athos, Aramis and D’Artagnan whiled away their time fighting on the stairs-either against each other, or the four of them shoulder to shoulder against any challengers. But this time they were in a hurry and, as they came into the room, Aramis searched among the throng of musketeers for a harassed looking young man in the livery of Monsieur de Treville-one of his attendants or clerks, who made it his business to announce when someone might have an urgent need. He cut through the crowd to approach the small dark-haired gentleman and whisper in his ear.
As the gentleman turned to go through the dueling crowd on the stairs and Aramis turned back to his friends, Porthos heard behind him, “I’d say they’re worried. I hear Porthos’s servant was arrested for murder.”
“He let his own servant be taken?” another voice said.
“Worse. He let his servant be taken by Richelieu ’s guards,” another said.
And yet another quipped in, in the tone of someone who would ape Aramis’s style of dressing and manner, without the slightest hint of the blond musketeer’s suave personality, “Well, murder surprises me, but we all know he’s a cursed little thief, don’t we.”
As Porthos felt his hand drop to the hilt of his sword, another voice said, “Oh, no. I wouldn’t say that.” Porthos halted his movement, but when the voice finished, “I’d never call Mousqueton little,” Porthos’s hand pulled up and his sword with it, glinting by the light coming in through the lead-paned windows of the antechamber.
“You dare,” he heard himself bellow, before he was even sure what he was about. “You insult me and my servant? In my hearing?”
Turning, he faced a group of five musketeers-it was plain they’d been the ones speaking. For one, even though the antechamber was so crowded that it would have been difficult for any individual person to move, everyone around them had managed to move back. They, themselves, looked as though they’d been stopped in the middle of taking a step back-but had done it too slowly to quite manage to meld with the crowd behind them, which managed to look as though they had always been back there, looking with interested eyes at the five and the irate giant redhead with his sword in hand.
Porthos’s eye alighted on each of the suddenly pale faces. Yes. As he expected. Three of them he didn’t know by name, though they’d probably been on the same side in a hundred street battles, when the cry of “to me, Musketeers” went up and any musketeer in range came to support his comrades.
The other two he knew all too well. One of them, Roux, who shared with Athos the superficial resemblance of being tall and dark haired-though his eyes were not dark blue and he did not have the same air of nobility-had for some time now taken to wearing the same old-fashioned, Spanish style tight doublets and flaring breeches that Athos favored. The other, Bernard D’Augine, was his best friend. Blond and slim like Aramis, he aped the blond musketeer in everything, from his fashionable clothes, to his habits of speech, and that annoying habit that Aramis had of turning his hand to contemplate his fingernails when he was about to say something particularly cutting.
In his defense-at least that Porthos knew-D’Augine had not taken to claiming that his passage through the musketeer corps was just a temporary detour on his way to becoming a priest. This, and this alone saved Porthos from wanting to cut his heart out right there. But he was not feeling particularly charitable for all that. “Draw,” he said, through clenched teeth. “All five of you draw. Let’s see if you’re match for my steel. Let’s see if, in my place, you would have been able to keep your servant from being arrested.”
He was dimly aware-as one atop a runaway horse is aware of the screams of those surrounding him-of Aramis’s voice saying “Porthos!” And of D’Artagnan’s putting in, “The edicts.”
He answered D’Artagnan. “Don’t worry. This is not dueling. It’s slaughter. I am going to-”
Before he had a chance to say what he was about to do, the voice that everyone in that antechamber obeyed rang from the top of the stairs. “Porthos! Athos! Aramis!” And, after the slightest hesitation, since Monsieur de Treville was not, after all, his captain, “D’Artagnan.”
The mass of men in the antechamber shifted again, parting like the sea before divine will. A clear path up the stairs was suddenly evident and through this loped Aramis, followed by Athos, who managed to rush while looking as if he weren’t doing so at all, and finally D’Artagnan, who tugged at Porthos’s sleeve on the way and whispered, “Sheathe.”
Porthos turned and sheathed, as he started up the stairs after his friends. Even at that moment, if one of the five had dared speak again, he feared he must turn back and massacre them, simply for the principle of it.
But there was no sound behind him, as he made it all the way up the stairs and got into the office in last place, just as Monsieur de Treville-taking his place behind a massive and cluttered desk-waved at the rest of them to take chairs.
Being invited to sit, in Monsieur de Treville’s office, was a rare occurrence and usually reserved for the delivery of bad news. Normally a conference in the captain’s office was restricted to one of two functions-informing the musketeers how far they’d trespassed on their captain’s goodwill and how they’d need to present really good reasons for their conduct or be dismissed; or listening to their problems and offering solutions.