“You mean,” D’Artagnan said. “That he might have done it to implicate Porthos in a crime? It has always seemed a little fantastic, though perhaps it is because I don’t have as much experience of Paris as you do.”
Aramis shrugged, one of his fashionably elaborate shrugs. He glanced at Athos, then turned to D’Artagnan. “Not that it’s impossible. He’s made other plots, just as elaborate, against other people. But normally, when he goes through this trouble, it is against crowned heads and those in power, not…”
“Not Porthos,” Athos said. “This has occurred to me. And yet, if he’s taken on a particular animosity…” He shrugged.
“There is still another objection,” D’Artagnan said.
“That if the lord had that many horses and had it all before the boy first approached him, surely he can’t have been thinking of such a plan.”
Athos shrugged. “It is possible,” he said. “That he has been in the Cardinal’s pay all along, and that the boy coming along merely provided the opportunity for him to render his eminence a service.”
D’Artagnan inclined his head. It was possible. Perhaps it was even likely. Sometimes it seemed that half the court was in the Cardinal’s pay. “But if so,” D’Artagnan said, “how convenient should it be that he found just the right boy to convince Porthos to teach him, and how cold-blooded to seize on any boy-”
“It wasn’t any boy,” Porthos said, in what was for him a roar, and which must have been heard loud and clear by the neighbors on either side. Then he lowered his voice to say, “It was my son.” His face had gone pale, his features wooden.
“Your son?” D’Artagnan asked, now fully convinced this was some bizarre dream. It was all tied with Porthos’s outburst yesterday and none of it made a wit of sense and he-
“Guillaume,” Porthos said, “was my son.” And proceeded to lay the story before them, in what was, for Porthos, almost an eloquent manner. His lost girlfriend, and the something of her he’d detected in the girl, Amelie. And Guillaume, named after the saint who supposedly protected the village at the center of Porthos’s domain, the village in which his manor house was located. “It is a very small village, you understand,” he said. “It is a very small manor house as well. Just a little place at the butt end of nowhere, and nothing like any of you would trouble yourselves with, but… small and humble as it was, it was my father’s domain and yet he thought we were that much better than the peasantry that he would not allow me…” He opened his hands, as though to signify his helplessness. “He said Amelie was common as muck, with no name and no ancestors and no fortune either, and I needed someone with fortune, someone, he said, with something in her stocking foot. He said if I left the domain, he would not do anything to her. Only find her a marriage, and be done with it. But if I didn’t leave, he was going to send her parents from the land, for, you see, they only held the land from us.”
“And so you left,” D’Artagnan said.
Porthos opened his hands in a show of helplessness that, in its way, was a more eloquent demonstration of grief than any number of elegies. “And I’m guessing she came after me, instead of taking the marriage offered,” Porthos said. “I swear by the Virgin and all the saints that I never thought she was that attached to me. If I had known…” He was silent a long time, chewing on the corner of his moustache. “But I would say the chances are very high, if not absolutely sure-and I’d hold it to be absolutely sure-that the boy was mine. And if the boy was mine, my son…” He shrugged.
“If the boy was yours, the wish to injure you might very well have gone beyond a wish to have you taken up for murder,” Athos said, “to a wish to hurt you personally, which brings me again, forgive me Porthos, to the possibility that someone with money…”
Porthos looked blankly at Athos, his hands still open on the table. Athos opened his hands, in turn, looking as if he couldn’t quite express himself with voice only. “Look, Porthos, Monsieur de Comeau is living well above his means. That usually means one is in the hands of the moneylenders. And if he’s in… If the moneylender has a call on him, he might very well have set Monsieur de Comeau the task of… well…”
Porthos stared for a long time. D’Artagnan’s understanding, of course, had leapt ahead to Athos’s meaning, but he thought Porthos hadn’t understood it, and he knew that Athos’s delicacy would forbid him from saying it more bluntly. “He means-” he started.
Porthos waved his hand, commanding him to silence. “I know very well what he means,” he said, and frowned. “He means that Monsieur Coquenard might well have given money to Monsieur de Comeau for his damned horses, and that as a result he was able to ask him to kill my son, in such a manner that he would die near me and even, perhaps, get me taken in for his death.” He made a face. “And I don’t say you might not have a point. After all, it is true, very true, you know, that cuckolds can have the weirdest turns. And while I don’t think Monsieur Coquenard cares, as such… Well…”
Athos nodded. “You can’t be sure. It’s quite possible he knows of the going ons. In fact, given the way you gain access to her house, and how often, I’d be shocked if he doesn’t. And if he knows…”
“He would hardly make an open fuss,” Porthos said. “Of course he wouldn’t. Because, you know, their kind doesn’t. They might starve their servants, and they might make the most distressing economies, but all in the secret of their houses. What they present to the world…” He shrugged. “And so, you see, I think it is quite possible he would do something like that, by stealth. But… that is not of any great significance. I can ask Athenais, you know?”
“And will she know?” Aramis asked. “It is my experience that often ladies don’t know anything of what goes on under their own roofs, save only if they have enough for their paint pots and their face creams.”
Athos smiled at this-one of his odd, secretive smiles that D’Artagnan had learned meant a secret amusement he didn’t wish to express aloud, either because it would forever blight his friendship with someone or because he thought of it as something best enjoyed in secret and silence.
Porthos, on the other hand, was never a man to keep anything to himself. At least not anything he could berate one of them for. He glared at Aramis. “Aramis,” he said. “You’ve met Athenais. If you think she doesn’t know all the accounts and everything that goes on in her husband’s firm and household, you’re a greater fool than I’ve ever known you to be.”
Aramis opened his mouth to reply. Even in the few months that D’Artagnan had known the three musketeers, he’d become accustomed to these quarrels between Porthos and Aramis. They’d arrive suddenly, progress alarmingly fast, and end with one or the other of them calling out for a duel before the offender apologized.
D’Artagnan felt they didn’t have time for it now, and it was entirely the wrong thing. He glared at Aramis, who seemed so surprised to encounter censure from such a quarter that he stopped with his mouth half-open.
Porthos waited for the answer for a second, and when it didn’t come, he got up, shrugging. “I suppose I’ll go to Athenais, then,” he said.
“Wait,” D’Artagnan said, getting up. And having said it wondered what he was thinking. The words had come out of his mouth so fast that he had no time to decide what had impelled them. It was much, he reflected, with chagrin, like Porthos saying that his mind didn’t know what he knew.
“Yes?” Porthos asked him.
And on that D’Artagnan’s sleep-befogged mind cleared. “What I meant,” he said. “Is that doubtless your Athenais will take some time to look through the books and discover whether Monsieur de Comeau has been receiving money from her husband. And even if she discovers it, because the matter is of such long standing-judging by the lord’s stables-how are you to prove he was involved in killing the young man?”