“But then… who can have killed the child and stolen the money?” Martin asked, scratching at his head, his face the picture of astonishment. He looked at them, one at a time again. “Are you sure this is not a joke you’re playing on me?”
“Sangre Dieu,” Porthos said. “How can it be a joke when a child is dead? No. It is not a joke and none of us is laughing.”
“Perhaps…” Athos said. “Perhaps you can do me a very great favor?”
Martin blinked. “Anything, Monsieur Musketeer, but…”
“Is there a place your wife hides money? A place she thinks you don’t know about?”
Martin looked blank for a moment, but then a fleeting smile crossed his lips. “Oh yes,” he said. “Provided I remember not to take too much or too suddenly, she just thinks she forgot how much she had.”
Porthos had seen this sort of arrangement many times and now kicked himself for not having thought of it before Athos did. Of course the wife would have a place to hide money that she considered secure. All the wives of profligate husbands given to drinking and consorting with women of easy virtue did. And of course her husband would have found it out years ago. All the husbands did. As long as you were careful to only milk the cow a little, the game could go on for years.
“Have you taken any money out of there recently?” Porthos asked.
Martin shook his head slowly. “Oh, not in a month, at least,” he said. “I try, you see, not to hit it too often, or she would find out.” He sighed. “It’s not that she’s a bad woman, you know, but she is, of herself, so cheerless and so little in need of company that she doesn’t understand that I require every once in a while to go elsewhere and to be with people who laugh and drink.” He frowned. “But what can any of this have to do with the boy and his money?”
“I would like you to go to that place now, with all of us attending, all of us watching,” Athos said.
“But… why? It’s in the tavern, you know? If she sees me go there and sees that I know her place she’ll only change it.”
“That…” Athos shook his head. “It won’t matter. Trust me. It’s the only way for you to understand and the only way for us to know for sure what happened.”
At this, Martin’s eyes flew wide, and he stared at Athos. “Here, what are you saying? Are you saying that Josiane murdered the boy? For money? It’s monstrous. She’s been my wife for twenty years. She would never-”
Athos straightened his back, his face a mask of perfect gravity. “If we go to the hiding place and you find nothing, I will accept I was wrong and I will apologize for having slandered your wife.”
Martin’s face hovered between shock and anger, but anger won out. “Oh, you will, by God,” he said. “You will beg my pardon and Josiane’s too. I know she has a temper and that, for reasons I don’t understand, she doesn’t like poor Amelie, but just for that, it is no reason to think that she would murder Guillaume. And Guillaume, yet, whom she didn’t care about one way or another, save that he helped bring heavy things into the tavern and looked after the guest’s horses.”
Martin wiped his hands to his voluminous apron. “You will be proven wrong, by God, follow me and you’ll see.” And full of his own righteous certainty, he marched towards the tavern.
The tavern was almost empty. Only one table-at a corner-was taken by a group of four strangers who were eating their midday meal in silence. Martin’s wife, behind the counter, was wiping it with vigor.
As they came into the tavern, with Porthos still carrying Amelie, she darted the girl a venomous look. “There you are, you laze about,” she said. “Again in the company of men. I don’t suppose it has occurred to you to go to the laundress as I sent you, to find-”
Her recrimination stopped, mid sentence while Martin walked in and walked straight towards the fireplace. When her voice resumed, the tone was the same, but the target different. “Martin, what are you doing? What do these men want?”
Martin, on a righteous mission of his own, ignored her. He marched straight to the fireplace, and grabbed at a certain brick that didn’t seem to protrude any more than any others. The sound of brick scraping on brick could be heard, as he moved it slightly back and forth.
“Martin, what are you doing?” his wife asked and, leaving the counter, came running towards them to grab onto Martin’s arm. “What are you doing? Have you gone mad?”
But he only shook his head and continued pulling. From where Porthos was, he could see that his face was set in an expression of anger, still, and his eyes burning with the certainty of his own righteousness.
“Martin!” his wife said, and now started raining blows on his arm and shoulder, blows he ignored as though they were no more than the sting of a wayward mosquito.
And then the brick came loose, and there was a sound of metal, and a rain of gold came spilling out of the hole in the wall, to tinkle on the floor, calling even the attention of the guests in the corner.
The woman wailed, and Martin stood, staring at the hole and at the gold. He put his hand into the hole in the wall and brought it out covered in coins, which he allowed to fall between his fingers to the floor, as though they didn’t mean anything or he wasn’t sure exactly what they were for.
Then he turned to his wife, his gaze still angry, but now burning with something else. “You,” he said. “You killed the boy. I could take your coldness. I could take the fact that you don’t love me. But you killed the boy? Why, Josiane, why?”
She looked at her husband, her face rigid, and then broke suddenly in a deep sob. She stumbled towards the nearest table and dropped onto a bench next to it. “You only married me because my parents owned the tavern,” she said. “I saw even then, how you looked at every pretty woman who passed by. And I thought it didn’t matter, because we’d have children, and I’d be the mother of your children. But it never happened. And then you had your whore come and live here, already with child, and then you had this other one”-She pointed at Amelie-“with her. And then Guillaume was just as bad as you are. That brat, always looking here and there, and knowing everything…
“I poisoned the slut. Five years ago, I poisoned the slut, and everyone thought she had died of a fever. The nightshade out back, my mother always said not to get any leaves in anything by accident, because it makes you burn up inside, and I gave it to her, because I knew you were visiting her every night, there, in the stable, like animals, and she was swelling up with another of your bastards, yet again. And I gave it to her and she died, but then you just started going to other women. And you wouldn’t come home till near morning, and drunk, and I thought, I thought…” She shook her head. “I got up, on Sunday, late at night, and I went into the stable, to see if you’d taken your horse, or if perhaps you’d gone out on foot, and I saw your brats with all this money, and he was talking about how they’d live like royalty. And I was sure it wasn’t money come through in a good way, and all I could think is that you’d leave with them. There was enough gold there to buy another tavern, if you wanted. And I thought you’d leave with them, and I’d be alone, and I didn’t even have any children. So I poisoned your bastard.”
Martin was staring at her, his mouth half-open in complete astonishment, his eyes filled with horror. But all he said was, “The children aren’t mine. I’d never laid eyes on Amelie when she first showed up here, and she was already big with child. That man says Guillaume was his son.”
The woman looked at Porthos, then back at her husband, and then at Amelie. “Oh, perhaps, but the girl has your face and your gestures, so I was justified in thinking they were both yours. And I was justified in killing him, too, and taking away his ill-gotten gains.”
She got up from the table, suddenly calm. “Put the money back in the wall. I don’t want to speak of this ever again.”