Porthos’s hands closed, on either side of his body. “If he killed Guillaume, I shall kill him.”
“How?” D’Artagnan asked.
“You can’t challenge him to a duel,” Athos said.
“Indeed, no,” Aramis put in. “His extreme old age protects him from such. And what are you going to do if you can’t challenge him to a duel? What do you intend to do?”
Porthos’s hands unclenched, then clenched again. “If he killed my son, I’ll kill him.”
Athos shook his head. “Indeed no.”
“We’d be very poor friends if we allowed you that course of action,” Aramis said. “It is one thing to kill someone in a duel, but another and quite different thing to kill him by stealth and in the dark, or to kill someone of such markedly inferior strength as Monsieur Coquenard. If you kill him it will be murder, and they’ll execute you, Porthos.”
Porthos was quiet a moment, then frowned and asked, as if the question were difficult to formulate, “I am to allow him to live, then? To go on as though nothing had happened? I know that the Cardinal has many such debts to his conscience and yet goes on living and, such as it is, ruling France. But surely, you don’t expect me to take the murder of my son in the same manner and to-”
“No,” D’Artagnan said. “No. We wouldn’t expect it and, indeed, wouldn’t look for it. Only that… to get your revenge, you will need to involve the law and that will necessitate more proof than the fact that Monsieur de Comeau was indebted to Monsieur Coquenard, because I fancy that hundreds of people are, and are not, for all that, murderers.”
“But-” Porthos said.
“What this means,” Athos said, his voice serious. “What D’Artagnan is trying to say is that we must gather more proof of his guilt.”
“How?” Porthos asked.
“Well, that was what I was thinking of,” D’Artagnan said. “And why I thought I could not allow this meeting to end before I had established it. We must find out why Guillaume had your genealogy, and indeed if it was him who gathered it or if someone gave it to him, and if he got it, at whose request.”
“How can we find out if he was the one who gathered it,” Porthos said, “when he’s dead? And you’re forgetting he went to St. Guillaume du Vallon.”
D’Artagnan inclined his head. “I’m not forgetting it, Porthos. Indeed, I’m not. But just because he went there, or was persuaded to go there, doesn’t mean he was the one who researched your genealogy-a difficult labor for a lad. And tedious, besides.”
“True, but in any case, he’s dead. How will we find-”
“If he went to the village, he stayed with someone and might have talked to someone,” D’Artagnan said. “We should go, all of us, and talk to people and find out what he did.”
“In my lands?” Porthos asked. “In my father’s lands? You want me to go and question my father?”
“Your father,” Athos said, with a speculative tone.
“Athos, it would be monstrous.”
“No more monstrous than things that happen daily,” Athos said.
"But…”
“We must,” Aramis said. “Go, as the Gascon says. We will ask leave of Monsieur de Treville.”
“And I will ask leave of Monsieur des Essarts,” D’Artagnan said.
“And before all of that, I shall go and talk to Athenais,” Porthos said.
At the Top of the Ladder; Accounts and Accounting; A Wife’s Loyalty
THE Coquenard home slumbered in silence. All but the mistress who, having responded to a hail of pebbles on her shutter, had opened the window and let down the rope ladder to admit Porthos.
Porthos had come into the small room-barely large enough for the one narrow bed and the small wardrobe at the foot-and there stood, holding his hat. He’d never felt so awkward in this place as he now did. Or at least, not since the first time that they’d conceived of this way of meeting. He was no longer sure which of them had suggested it, but the first time he’d climbed the ladder and found himself here, he’d been half in thrall of her and half in fear of doing this in a full house, with servants waiting.
Like that first time, this time, he stood by the window, his back to it, silent and still. Athenais faced him, her hair loose down her back, her simple nightgown hugging her body and revealing that despite the white threads in her hair, the fine wrinkles at the corner of her eyes, she was still more beautiful than half the painted misses at court. Her face went from a welcoming smile to a look of alarm. “Porthos,” she said. And after a pause, in which he didn’t answer her, “What is wrong?”
Porthos shook his head, trying to figure out how to begin and how to tell Athenais so many momentous things. Not for the first time, he wished he had Aramis’s facility with words, his ability to ease his way into serious subjects with a quote, a scrap of Latin. But it wasn’t part of him. He looked up, and his eyes met his lady’s serious gaze. “Athenais,” he said, only the word came out more as a lament, than just a saying of her name.
And now Athenais was alarmed, crossing the distance between them, taking his hand in hers. “What is wrong?”
“I don’t know how… I don’t know if… How can I tell you? How can I ask you?” Porthos said, hearing his voice out of control and trying to keep it low so no one in the nearby rooms would hear him. What if Monsieur Coquenard had already heard him? What if it had cost him his boy’s life? “I don’t…” He swallowed hard.
Her hands, holding one of his, squeezed tight. “You must know,” she said. “You must know that there is nothing you can’t tell me. While we have not had the benefit of having our hands joined in church, surely you know that our souls have long been joined, that…”
Porthos sighed, a heavy sigh, and said the only thing he could think of, “You will be angry at me.”
“I? Angry at you? When have I been angry at you?”
“All the time. When I brought Athos over. When I do something you think is stupid. When you hear I fought a duel. When I make too much noise trying to get your attention at the window. When…”
She smiled. “I do get angry at you, don’t I? Enough, I suppose. But I don’t get angry at you in truth, Porthos. Irritated, perhaps. Annoyed. Particularly when you fight needless duels. But I don’t hold anger against you for any time, Porthos. I don’t resent you for hardly any time at all.”
Porthos blinked. He knew this was true. Oh, in truth of fact, many times he’d climbed that rope ladder to find his Athenais fully dressed, with flashing eyes and stern countenance, ready to read him the riot book for, what she called, his mad behavior and his foolish disregard for his own life and nature. But there was never a time he’d left the room without their having made up, without her having at last smiled at him, even if she told him he was a very great fool as she smiled. And he’d never left without sharing her bed or, time not permitting so much, without holding her in his arms.
He took a deep breath and stepped away from the wall, and across to the bed, on which he sat. It creaked under his weight, as he looked up at Athenais’s worried face.
“Are you ill?” she asked him, anxiously. “You know, you could stay in that little house down the way, and I could come and nurse you often enough and-”
“I’m not ill,” he said. “I know I must look ghastly, but it is not illness. I wish it were, as it would be easier to cure. But it’s not. Alas. No physical illness, at least. My heart…”
She searched his features with an anxious gaze. At last she knelt at his feet, and took his hands in hers. “My dear, what are you afraid of? What happened? Did anyone tell you I played you false? For if they did, they were wrong, you know? I never even look at other men.”