The man who stepped forward to examine it and pat it was perhaps in his late fifties, a tall and spare man, with white hair and a face marked by the creases of a farmer who lived most of his life outside. His beard was wild, and his eyes glared above it. “You had no right,” he said. “This is a respectable house. You have no right to come here, lord or no lord.”
Aramis judged this had gone far enough. He stepped forward. “Old man,” he said. “You have no right to address one of the King’s own Musketeers that way. For it would be disrespect to the King himself, and that in turn would force all the King’s Musketeers to fight you.”
The old man looked at Aramis, and his mouth dropped open. Aramis judged that in these heathen parts they’d never seen a man wearing the latest in soft over-breeches of finest velvet, and perhaps not the looser doublets that were now fashionable. At least everyone he had met here, even the better dressed, tended to favor the tight-fashioned clothes that Athos relished wearing, in the fashion of ten to twenty years ago.
At this moment, as though to increase the man’s confusion, Athos stepped forward. He was doing his best grand seigneur impression, his head thrown back, his hand on the pommel of his sword, and, despite his worn and faded uniform, he managed to look far more the nobleman than Aramis knew he’d ever look. Aramis wanted to glare at Athos, but he knew that would be fruitless, as they’d had this contest many times before and each time Aramis had lost. So, instead, he glared intently at the man.
“My friend came to ask you some questions,” Athos said. “By order of the King. Questions pertaining to the youth who called himself Guillaume and who-”
“I never met any youth named Guillaume,” the farmer said, glaring back at all four of them, since D’Artagnan had taken this opportunity to step forward and stand on the other side of Porthos.
“Oh, surely you jest,” Athos said. “For you see we have accurate information that the youth came here, and we are on his Majesty’s orders to find all we can about his visit and about what he might have said and done.”
Aramis was briefly, breathtakingly impressed by Athos’s capacity to lie. And then he realized that Athos was speaking nothing but the truth. For, after all, they were here on the orders of Monsieur de Treville, and it was doubtless that Monsieur de Treville was speaking on behalf of the King himself. Therefore, since they were investigating the murder at the behest of their captain, they were under the King’s orders to investigate whatever Guillaume had done on his visit to the village of St. Guillaume.
The farmer frowned. “The boy weren’t nothing but his whelp. His whelp and that of the abandoned slut who-”
“Enough,” Porthos said. He stepped forward. “Enough.” His hand went up and closed around the farmer’s neck. “You will not speak of her that way. You-”
“I’ll speak of her as I please. And you know she was a slut, since you was the one who debauched her,” the farmer said, glaring up at Porthos, unafraid of the giant’s hand at his throat.
“Porthos,” Athos said. “That solves nothing.”
“God’s truth,” Porthos said. “And I know it doesn’t. But I would feel better for knowing there was one less villain in the world. How could anyone send his own daughter out into the world, alone and with child, just because they think she marred their precious honor!”
“Oh, it’s very easy for you to speak of honor that way,” the farmer said, stepping back from Porthos’s hand, back from the reach of Porthos’s fingers. “You have lands and papers that prove your family is noble. We have nothing but this farm and what we can make grow with the sweat of our brows. If I allowed the slut to live here, I could only give my other girls in marriage to the poorest of the poor. No respectable merchant or attorney would trust a woman who came from such a tainted background. And why should they, when she had no dowry, either? Now I have made some, and my granddaughters shall leave the house with enough money on their stocking foot to see them to a good marriage. But back then I didn’t. In corrupting my daughter-”
“I didn’t corrupt her,” Porthos said. “I loved her.”
“Funny love, then, that runs off to Paris, leaving her embarrassed. I figured I’d send her to Paris and she could find you and marry you. Or not. It’s not my fault she didn’t find you.”
Porthos opened his mouth and closed it. Aramis wondered whether the telling words in that sentence had had any effect on him. Porthos was both complex and astonishingly simple. It was quite possible he had taken no more notice of those words than any others. As it was possible, too, that he had remarked them all too well and knew precisely what they meant. Whichever way that went, he seemed, for the moment, struck speechless.
“I had the boy beat and thrown out of doors. I don’t know what he wanted, but I know that it took me a devil of time to convince the other boys he’d been some mad fool with nothing to do with them. He came in claiming to be your son and… hers. And hers. And now, how I’ll undo the damage of your presence…”
“There is no damage,” Athos said. “If only you’ll tell us why you, and, yes, your wife, then visited Paris several times, including I believe last week?”
The farmer seemed to choke on something. “Why we visited? Oh, to do business, for as I told you, we are prosperous now, and we can travel to Paris on business. If you care to ask, you’ll find we visit Paris several times a year. Is this forbidden to the likes of us?”
“Not at all,” Athos said, though his entire demeanor proclaimed he didn’t believe a single word from the man.
As they walked away-without turning their backs, because Aramis judged these were just the sort of people who would do them an injury if they could-the gate slammed forcefully and there was a raised din of men’s voices and dogs, but no one came out.
After a while they turned around and led their horses away.
“He wasn’t telling the truth, you know?” Aramis asked Porthos.
“Aramis, I know you have no high opinion of my intelligence, but pray believe me, I am aware that he wasn’t telling the truth about merely visiting Paris on business. I would bet he went to ferret out Amelie’s whereabouts. And Guillaume’s.”
“And found them,” Aramis said, piqued at being told that he considered Porthos stupid, which was not true. “For else, how would he know you never married Amelie? That would take more than merely looking at parish records. You would have to find Amelie and know how she was living.”
Porthos face darkened at this. “If he found her,” he said. “Then he found his own granddaughter, of the same name, living under pitiable conditions. And he did nothing to rescue her.”
Aramis opened his mouth, but did not know what to say to this.
Porthos turned around, “I have half a mind to go back and-”
“No,” Athos said. “No. Now let us find who is guilty of murdering Guillaume. And then we shall worry about Amelie’s situation. Come, Porthos. You must be patient. For the sake of completeness, let us find what Guillaume told the curate in this parish, that allowed him to copy your family’s records. And then we shall be on the road to Paris, where we’ll endeavor to trace the movements of Amelie’s father and mother.”
Recognition and Identity; Ancestral Tombs; Cousins and Confusion
IT didn’t surprise D’Artagnan that Aramis took the lead when they reached the church. Among the four of them, they would easily have agreed that churches were Aramis’s special domain.
None of them would have disputed that an occasion that called for Latin, or candlelight, for theology or musty disputations against the number of angels, should, by necessity, involve Aramis. It was like saying that any occasion that caused for an intimate knowledge of the functioning of great noble houses or ancient Greek history would call for Athos; or that a facility with border Spanish and an ease of melding amid those common as muck should be left to D’Artagnan; or even that anything needing the application of Herculean strength and the sort of mental disposition that cut through all sorts of rhetoric would belong to Porthos.