Aramis shrugged. “You always assume all of us are weak enough for any woman, that we’d be most likely to run to any woman at a time of trouble, but tell me, what rational sense does it make?”
“It makes no rational sense to me,” Athos said, speaking slowly. “That any of you get involved with these women and that you give them power over your lives and over your safety.”
Aramis’s eyes burned with quick offense that made Athos wonder if the blond musketeer was well on his way to replacing his seamstress. With Aramis, he dared say, they’d find out only when he was ready to let them find out, unlike the young Gascon whose partiality for his landlord’s wife flared in blushes, and showed itself in stammers, and whose thought was so dominated by the woman that he would bend the entire investigation around the need to see her.
“I think, Athos, that you, too, have done this in the past. You have behaved irrationally and given power over your life and your safety to women.”
Athos felt the cut, but it was an old wound and one that no longer bled. One that, like old battle wounds, flared only under very precise conditions and whose dull, aching venom could be ignored the rest of the time. “I never said, Aramis, that I was a saint. Only that I saw the error of my ways and I no longer follow my animal impulses when they could endanger my life and sanity.”
Aramis opened his mouth, as though to answer, but before he could speak, D’Artagnan said, “All that is very well, but granted, Athos, the rest of us are fools for women, still, where could Porthos have gone? The two of you have known him much longer than I have. What could have prompted him to forget his appointment with Aramis and to disappear?”
“A message,” Aramis said, and half rose. “A message saying it came from one of us, and demanding he meet us somewhere.”
“But none of us sent him a message. At least I didn’t, did you D’Artagnan?” Athos asked.
“Athos, I didn’t say one of us had sent it, only that someone came to Porthos and said we had. And thus…”
“Convinced him to go to an ambush?” Athos rose in turn.
“Sirs,” Mousqueton said, speaking quietly from where he’d been, near the fireplace, engaged in disposing wood upon it, against-Athos supposed-the time when nights became cold again. A corpulent young man, he looked most of the time like a simpleton disposed to smiling too much. But his dark eyes were shrewd and as full of cunning as Aramis’s green ones. “Sirs, I beg your pardon, but my master is no fool and-”
“I never said he was,” Athos said coldly.
“No, sir,” Mousqueton said, facing up to Athos’s displeasure with more aplomb than many a nobleman would have managed. “However, you believe that he would leave his post and go in search of whoever he believed had sent him a message.”
“All of us would,” Athos said. “If it came from one of the other three and said they needed help urgently.”
Mousqueton shook his head. “No monsieur. I hate to disagree with you, but… You see, my master is a modest man.” He saw Athos’s cocked eyebrow and responded to it. “He’s modest where it counts. Not perhaps in his attire or in the flair with which he displays his sword handling, but he is modest where it counts. He would never trust himself, by himself, to untangle whatever problem the others of you might be facing. So if that were the case, if someone had called him and told him that another of you needed rescuing, he would have gone in search of Monsieur Aramis. Or else, he would have sent someone in search of him. Hermengarde or someone else he could command.”
Having kept his countenance steady and his gaze straight on Athos all through this, Mousqueton now betrayed his nervousness by wiping his broad hands to the front of his doublet-a carefully refashioned old one of Porthos’s. “I hate to contradict such a noble person as yourself, Monsieur Athos, but the truth is I know my master.”
The man’s nervousness and his humility combined with his stuborness granted him one of Athos’s rare smiles. “You might be right, Mousqueton, but granting you that you are, would you tell me, please, where your master might have gone, and what he might be doing?”
Mousqueton shrugged. “If he went of his own accord it could be anywhere, sir. He… He was suffering shock from the death of the boy, was he not? And when he’s in shock or otherwise worried, my master is as likely as not to walk aimlessly for hours. He’s done it before, monsieur, before he decided to throw his lot in with Monsieur Aramis and to become a musketeer.”
“You say if he went of his own accord. You mean, you consider he might not have?”
Mousqueton shrugged. “It would take a half a dozen men. You know how my master fights, sir. But it is possible, yes. I’m not stupid, Monsieur Athos-”
“Not at all,” Athos said.
“Then credit me with having heard that you are afraid the Cardinal has something to do with this, and if he does… It’s likely as not my master is in the Bastille, is it not?”
Just on those words, from downstairs came the sound of someone knocking hard on the door.
Devotion and Worship; Comfort and Hunger; Where Some Women Are Infinitely Superior to Duchesses
PORTHOS had left the palace before he realized he was doing it. It was his absolute certainty that Hermengarde would come back with no new discoveries, with nothing- in fact-that Porthos didn’t know already.
She would not know who Guillaume’s parents were. Porthos tried to remember all that Guillaume had told him about his family, as he walked. Strangely, for a boy who’d said his father didn’t want him to learn swordplay, he’d never mentioned his father at all. There had been no comments about something his father had done or said. Truth be told, there were no comments about his mother even. The only person the boy talked about was his sister Amelie.
Porthos remembered the name because it had tender associations for him. When he’d been a young man, younger by just a little than D’Artagnan was now, there had been a young woman named Amelie.
Porthos’s father said she was a peasant with her feet in the muck, but to Porthos she’d been kind and gentle, her voice ever pleasing. And though most people in the village treated Porthos as they treated his father-as creatures to avoid at all costs and to lie to when they couldn’t avoid them-Amelie had treated her giant, redheaded future lord as she would have treated a village lad her age.
In the fields, beneath the overspreading trees and behind thickets of berry-heavy bushes, Porthos had learned the first steps in the love of women. And Amelie had learned right along with him, he supposed.
It had come to a bad ending. It was bound to. Porthos’s father didn’t like the idea of his heir being involved with a peasant girl. If Porthos married at all, Porthos’s father had told him, it would have to be later, and it had better be to a girl of some worth. Later, because first Porthos must endeavor to raise the fortunes of a miserable rural backwater of a domain that could hardly support many more generations-what with its peasants leaving, generation by generation, and going to the cities in search of fortune. And to a girl of some worth to increase the chances that Porthos’s grandchildren could still support their title.
Porthos had raged and stormed and his father-just as redheaded, just as large and far more brutish, hardened by a life on the land, a life of seeing his prestige diminish- had raged. They’d clashed and fought and for a time Porthos had entertained running away with Amelie and marrying her somewhere secret. But then Amelie’s father had said he’d send her to a convent and lock her away on bread and water, a penitent the rest of her life. Or, if Porthos would simply leave her alone, they would arrange a suitable marriage for her, and she would be able to go on with a normal life.