And Porthos’s father had threatened to turn her family out unless Porthos left for a while and thus broke the affair off completely.
Threats to him, Porthos could withstand and laugh at. But threats to Amelie made him quake and regret his rash and foolish attachment.
He’d left for Paris before the end of October, and in Paris… Walking along the streets of that town, as evening spun to night and the smell of cooking and of family dinners enjoined around a thousand humble tables mingled on the street, he rubbed the bridge of his nose. In Paris, he’d found his avocation with sword-first teaching sword fighting, and then as a musketeer.
And in Paris he’d met Aramis and Athos and D’Artagnan. Few men, he knew, were so fortunate as to have such friends, brave and capable and as close to him as his own hand or his own arm. But…
But he wondered what would have happened if his father had let him marry Amelie. They would be poor as church mice, doubtless. One of those families with little more to pride themselves upon than the noble ancestors of at least one of them. And heaven knew, even his ancestors weren’t that noble.
They would have gone without food as often as he went without food now. And doubtless, many a time he would have had to work the fields alongside his peasant farmers, clearing land and seeding it. Doubtless his children would be little more than farmers. His children…
He bit at his tongue hard to stop that train of thought, which brought with it a thought of Guillaume and of the parents who would, even now, be worrying about him, the parents to whom Porthos could bring nothing but bad news.
Shaking his head, he realized he’d walked across half the town and that he was now in a neighborhood that was very familiar to him. It was a bourgeois neighborhood of houses that stood shoulder to shoulder, their closed facades keeping behind them the private lives of the residents and their private economies and presenting nothing but solidity to the world.
Up that street and down another, he would come to the garden of Monsieur Coquenard, accountant. And behind the house, the third window on the left was Athenais. A carefully aimed shower of pebbles upon her shutter would bring down the rope ladder through which Porthos could ascend to the closest thing to heaven he was likely to know in his life.
Only… It was too early for that. It was afternoon and everyone would see him.
But his need drove him. It was, like most things that caused him to act and act quickly, something he could neither think clearly through nor even attempt to put into words. Just a feeling. A feeling that Athenais would know what to do. She would make sense of this all. He must go to Athenais.
Because going into her garden and throwing pebbles at her window was out of the question, instead, he went into the alley at the back of her house. He had some vague idea of waiting there for hours, till darkness fell, till the movement in the house stopped, but when a girl came out, headed for the alley, he recognized her as Athenais’s maid, who had seen enough of their meeting in public and private that, if she didn’t know they were lovers she was a worse fool than Porthos was willing to credit.
When the girl saw him, she widened her eyes. Of course, even if he was known, meeting a musketeer in an isolated alley would be alarming for any woman.
Porthos hastened to remove his hat, hold it to his chest and bow.
“Mademoiselle,” he said. “Mademoiselle. I’m sorry to surprise you like this. I meant you no harm.”
The girl smiled and batted her eyelashes at him. She put her hand to her relatively inconsequential bosom with more theatrics than real alarm. “Oh, Monsieur Porthos,” she said. “You scared me.”
He bowed again, deeper. “Pardon me, mademoiselle, only… I wanted to know if you could take a message of mine to your mistress.”
“My… mistress?”
“Madame Coquenard,” Porthos said. Just last week he’d visited and this chit of a girl had seen him. Granted, he’d visited via the rope ladder and his time with Athenais had been scant. Still, he didn’t think anything could have happened to Athenais in a week. At least nothing he would not have heard about.
The maid shook her head. “Oh, the mistress isn’t here,” she said, making Porthos feel as though his heart had just dropped out of his chest and to the muddy ground of the alley.
“Where is she?” Oh, let her not have gone to her parents, who were minor nobility somewhere in the wretched countryside.
“At church,” the girl said. “Only, they had a Mass for a friend of Monsieur Coquenard’s that died last week, and she has gone to attend.”
“Oh,” Porthos said, and hesitated for a moment, not sure how to ask which church.
“St. Magdalene’s,” the girl said. “Just down that way and up the street.”
Porthos followed it before he thought what he was going to do. After all, what could a man do in those circumstances? It wasn’t as though he could barge into the church and there, in the incense-scented decorum of saints and sermons, pull Athenais away for a cozy little chat on murder and the horrors of the lonely life of a musketeer who’d never have children, could he?
When he got to the church, it was worse than he’d thought. For one, it was packed. And packed with the sort of upper-middle-class people who prized themselves on dressing well but in as dull a manner as possible. His musketeer’s uniform, his plumed hat clutched in a sweaty hand, all called attention to him. The gold trim on his coat and hat was matched only by the gold decor of the church and the deep blue velvet of his clothing echoed only in the deep blue of a cloak on the statue of the virgin, in its wall niche to the right of him. All the rest of the church, all of it, was thronged with people in black and brown or somber and boring grey.
He looked at that massed dullness, trying to see his Athenais, trying to spy her reddish gold hair-to speak the truth fast going white-amid the many people in the room. But he couldn’t see any woman’s hair. All of them were swathed in cunning hats and veils.
And the air was thick with incense, and the priest, standing at the podium and speaking, had a rolling, thunderous voice as he spoke of carnal sins and of the death that waited even the most proud man, the most beautiful woman.
Porthos sweated and prayed. His relationship with God was very simple. He asked only that God take care of those things that Porthos could not take care of for himself. Oh, Porthos would try to get food for himself. And Porthos would fight valiantly against those who were his foes, or simply against those who were willing to fight when he was bored. And he didn’t seek God’s help against what he considered the greatest evils in his world-the lack of good wine, and uppity guards of the Cardinal hell bent on enforcing the edicts against dueling.
In return, he asked only that God play fair with him and be a gentleman-that God not allow him to get killed by accident when he was fighting as well as he could, that God not strike him or his friends with some shameful debilitating disease, and that God not take in account Athenais’s wedding vows, for what did they mean? Athenais had been as good as sold off by her father, a penniless nobleman who’d betrothed her to a wealthy accountant in return for having his own debts forgiven. And the accountant was seventy when Athenais had married him, and who could expect him to live another ten years as he had already, preserved in venom and vinegar.
And if Athenais’s marriage had been consummated, well it had been long ago, and it had been done in a way that neither formed her expectations nor marred them. It was left to Porthos to show her the pleasure that could be obtained between a man and a woman. And her heart was as truly knit to his and his to hers as if they’d been married. And it was no one’s business at all, and Monsieur Coquenard’s least of all.
The preaching of the priest made him nervous nonetheless. It twined with Guillaume’s death and with his own feelings that his life had taken a wrong turn somewhere, and left him bereft and wondering if he was indeed in the hands of a vengeful God.