“Is it normal for you not to see him for days?” Athos asked.
The man shrugged. His unconcerned face seemed to show absence of guilt. “Oh, he’s been gone, now and then, for two or three days. Never more than that because, you see, he’s not really a bad boy and he cares for his sister, and comes back to see her. Amelie, she’s good and she’s always here and always helpful. But Guillaume…” He shrugged again. “Young boys will be young boys. In my own day, I used to dream…” For a moment his eyes unfocused, as though he were looking back at a lost time. “I used to dream many things. But the thing is… He’s not a fool, and he will look around till he finds something that suits him. He worked for a nobleman for a short time, but he didn’t like it, and they thrashed him, so he came back here and ran errands for me awhile longer.”
“A nobleman?” Athos asked. “Would you happen to know his name?”
“I don’t rightly remember. Why?”
“Because I’d like to know if perhaps the boy has already found employment with this nobleman, in which case my searching for him is in vain.”
“No, no,” the tavern master said. “He didn’t find employment with the man. He left him. Something about the man giving him a thrashing.”
“And yet,” Athos said, making his face as impassive as possible. He was vaguely aware that somewhere near the bar the woman was muttering at the young girl. “And yet, I think these things are sometimes not as clear as they seem. Young boys, particularly, get angry at a master for an unkind word and leave as though this were the end of the world… only to come back later and make it up and seek employment again.”
The tavern keeper sighed. “It is possible,” he said, but in the tone of a man who concedes a point so as to avoid an argument more than because it’s true.
He looked as though he were thinking things through and Athos would have bet what he was thinking was that it wouldn’t do any harm at all to send the men to the nobleman. At the worst, it would be a wild goose chase, and it would get them out of his hair.
Because Athos was sure the man didn’t know the boy was dead-either that or he was the world’s best actor-he would be thinking if he could forestall the whole thing a while Guillaume would show up and take care of his own business.
“Amelie,” the tavern keeper called. “Amelie, if you would please…”
Both woman and girl looked up. The girl was crying. There were marks of tears on her cheeks. The woman was lowering a hand that had been raised either for a slap or for another slap. She pushed the girl rudely, in the middle of her back. Her lips moved. She whispered, but it was clear she was saying “Go then.”
None of the men around the tavern seemed in the least concerned with this scene and Athos, himself, didn’t know why it made his hair stand at the back of his neck and why it made him feel less desirous of drinking the very appetizing wine in front of him.
It was the nature of human beings-though perhaps not the best part of their nature-to abuse those over whom they had power. This, writ large, had led to the tyrannies of the Roman emperors. Writ far smaller, it commanded a myriad smaller tyrannies, from the father who imposed his every wish on his terrified sons to the master who abused a helpless servant. It was nothing new. Nor could Athos, with the best intentions in the world, stop humans from behaving as humans.
He was not a child, charging out at the world, ready to right all wrongs and correct every injustice. He was not even a young man like D’Artagnan full of illusions and hope for the world. He was older, and tired, and sure of nothing except that he too could commit horrible acts. So why was he bristling at the treatment of this young girl who now approached, her eyes full of tears, wiping her face on the back of her hand.
She managed a little smile for Athos, and a pretty curtsey.
And Athos who knew very little about how not to scare people-Athos who could make strong men quake and who had been known to intimidate the most evil hearted of villains-forced a smile at her. He was afraid it looked either like a sickly expression or like a display of teeth in menace. From the girl’s little startled jump, he was afraid it looked like that to her too. But he modulated his voice and tried to speak sweetly, gently, as his nursemaid had once spoken to him. “Amelie,” he said. “This man-”
“Martin, monsieur,” the tavern keeper said.
“Martin tells me that your brother was briefly employed by a nobleman, but Martin does not remember the name. Do you?”
Amelie nodded, her grey eyes still overflowing with tears and very attentive and grave. “Yes. Yes, I do. It was Monsieur de Comeau.”
“Comeau… and where does he lodge?” Athos asked. He had a vague memory of having heard the name and the association was not pleasant.
“Guillaume said he was down that street awhile and that he rented the two floors over a bakery. He did not tell me any more.”
Athos nodded gravely. The girl had pointed down the main street on which the tavern was located and finding a place down the street atop a haberdashery wouldn’t be all that hard. That a nobleman was lodging in this part of town meant he probably wasn’t very wealthy. Then again, renting two floors would require more income than any of the musketeers could command. “Thank you, Amelie,” he said trying to keep his voice even and low, in the same way as before and hoping-very much hoping-it didn’t come across as a threatening whisper.
“Monsieur,” Amelie said, eagerly. “Is he there, then? With Monsieur de Comeau? He said he would come back and he would have a lot of money, and that he would take me with him and I’d live like a lady. Is he there? Did he get employment with Monsieur de Comeau again?”
Athos was saved from answering by the tavern keeper’s putting his hand on the girl’s shoulder and saying, in a much better gentle voice than Athos was sure he could command, “Now, Amelie, don’t bother the gentleman. He is trying to find your brother to offer him employment. I’m sure we all want to see your brother employed in a position he enjoys. Whether he’ll ever make enough to take you with him, much less to have you live like a lady…” Martin shrugged. “You must not believe all the crazy dreams your brother spins.”
Martin turned to Athos, “The boy means well, and, as I said, who did not entertain a crazy dream as a young man. I assure you he is normally reliable, at least when properly employed. Of course, we never quite employed him, just told him he could get some food in return for a bit of work. So he never had a real job here, but he helps our stable boys look after guests’ horses and I’m sure-”
Athos realized the man was doing his best to repair any impression he might have given that the boy, Guillaume, might be unreliable. He was doing his best, and a bit besides, to convince Athos that the boy could be hired and that the boy was worth hiring.
Picking up his cup of wine and taking a quick swallow of the wine, Athos thought of Porthos saying that the boy had always been exactly punctual. An amazing virtue in a young nobleman, as they had thought him at the time, but even more laudable when it involved a young peasant boy who could, at any time, be commanded to some task that might interfere with his time and his plans.
From his description, too, having acquired his letters early and without any real instruction, Guillaume must have been a smart boy. Perhaps Porthos was right in lamenting him. Perhaps he would have become a man worthy of being called friend.
And thinking of Porthos, Athos realized that Porthos had grabbed young Amelie’s arm and was talking to her, in hushed tones. He wasn’t absolutely sure what Porthos meant by it, or what he was trying to find out. With Porthos it could be intensely important and absolutely all that needed to be known on the case, or something so strange as to have no bearing whatsoever on events.
In case it was the first, though, and suspecting that the tavern keeper might interfere with the talk, should he notice, Athos endeavored to keep the man from noticing.
“Does Guillaume ride?” he asked. “My friend might have need of a young man who can ride messages to his father’s domain a few
hours distant.”
A Name Well Remembered; Porthos’s Guilt; A Girl’s Shame
"AMELIE.” Porthos grabbed at the girl’s arm, as she was about to go away, and she turned from the table to stare at him, her eyes half-afraid and half-hopeful. “Amelie, what was your mother’s name?”
It had been working at him for a while. It was probably nothing. How many women were there in France named Amelie? Dozens. Hundreds. So why should he imagine, looking at this girl, that she was the daughter of the woman- no, the girl-he’d loved as a young man? Amelie didn’t look a thing like that other Amelie of time’s past. She had lank mousy-colored hair, where Porthos’s Amelie had blond hair. And her grey eyes had no echo of Amelie’s dark ones.
And yet… Perhaps it was Porthos’s guilt working at him. He’d left in the dead of night, without so much as saying good-bye to the girl who’d given him everything, the girl who’d shown him what the love between a woman and a man could be.
He’d thought at the time that if he just left, she could continue with her life without thinking about him. After all, what had Porthos been in her life but a distraction and a nuisance? What good was he, or dreaming of him-of marrying the gentleman’s son-to a simple farm girl? If he left, he thought, she would marry someone else quickly. And her life would go on as if nothing had happened between them. Let him carry the sense of what he had lost, but let her not suffer.
That had been the idea, but was it the truth? Horrible ideas rose in his mind, ideas he didn’t want to dignify with full thought. He didn’t want his mind to know what he thought. He didn’t want his mind to even suspect it, truth be told. But he knew… he knew all too well.
The grey-eyed little girl looked back at him. “My mother?” she asked.
“Do you know what your mother’s name was.”
“They called her Pigeon,” she said.
“Who did?” Athos asked.
“Men.”
His heart clenched. There was no reason, really, none at all to imagine that Pigeon could ever have been his girlfriend, but what if she had? She had been someone’s girlfriend. And there was Guillaume with Porthos’s genealogy in his pouch. But he’d never tried to blackmail Porthos, and why else would it matter to him?
“But that was not her real name, was it?” he asked. He kept his voice even, sweet. The girl looked scared and he didn’t want to scare her. First, he knew well enough that his towering height and his red hair scared most people. And second, he could well imagine that being interrogated by Athos would scare practically anyone. He didn’t need to induce more terror in Amelie. “Do you know what her real name was?”
Amelie nodded, once. “Amelie,” she said. “Like my name.”
“Ah,” Porthos said. “And did you know… Did your mom ever talk of her fiancé, that she came to Paris to find?”
Amelie shook her head, then shrugged. “Not to me, but she must have talked to Guillaume, because he said he’d found him.”
Porthos’s heart clenched within his chest. “Guillaume found him?” he asked, unable to keep his panic from his voice. “Guillaume found his… father?”
The girl nodded. “He said his father was a nobleman and he had found him,” Amelie said. “And then he said that he was going to get me money, lots of it, and that he would come get me and I would live like a lady.”
Porthos’s brain had gone numb. His father was a nobleman. He had found him. He was going to get money and take his sister to live like a lady. Sangre Dieu, he was my son, Porthos thought. And on the heels of that. And he was going to blackmail me.
In the surge of these conflicting emotions, his mind and heart seized and he trembled.
Seeing him tremble, Amelie surged forward, put her hand on his shoulder. “Monsieur? Are you well? Only you look so ill.”
And out of nowhere the tavern keeper’s wife descended, hard of face and harsh of voice, grabbing at the girl, pulling her away from Porthos, raining a hail of blows on the girl’s face, on the little frail body. “Whore,” she screamed. “You’re a whore like your mother. It’s all you’ll ever be. Tempting men. You’re not even a woman and you’re a whore.”
Porthos rose, grabbing for the woman’s arm, and found the tavern keeper, Martin, holding his arm. “No,” he said. “No. Let her be. If you come between you’ll only make it worse. If you come between she’ll kill the girl or turn her out which is the same as killing her. No. This will blow over, it always does.” He spoke, fast, low, in a whisper that could be heard by Porthos, but not by anyone else over the woman’s scream. The other diners looked on the thrashing as a spectacle. The other musketeers and D’Artagnan rose from the table, hands on their swords, but they didn’t move, while the tavern keeper stood there, holding Porthos’s arm and whispering. “If you go for her, I’ll have to defend her,” he said. “And then your friends will kill me, and Amelie will have no protection. Please, Monsieur Musketeer I beg you to believe I do not want the girl hurt or thrown out.”
His voice was so earnest, his expression so urgent that Porthos believed him. Quite without knowing what to say, he felt as if he were back in his youth, back in the time when his father had laid his choices before him and sent him from du Vallon rather than letting him elope with Amalie.
A bargain with the devil, he thought. I’m making a bargain with the devil. But sometimes all choices are bargains with the devil and seeing the girl get beaten-very still, without crying-he realized that for Amelie these beatings were nothing new and that he couldn’t in any way help her. Not by interfering. Bad as her situation was, it would be worse out on the streets.
And what could he offer her, if she were thrown out? It was possible that Aramis knew of some charity, some house that took in girl children of uncertain parentage and no means. But almost for sure, there, too, she would be beaten. And it was not as if he could take her home and adopt her. Had she been a boy and known how to cipher, he could have handed her over to Athenais. However, even in Athenais’s care, he knew the clerks often starved, on the meager money her husband allowed for their feeding. Oh, not starved to death, but went about famished and disconsolate. That was where they had found D’Artagnan’s servant, and Porthos remembered how Planchet preferred even the irregular food he got now to the continuous privation of an attorney’s clerk.
He could do nothing. All this went through his mind, as he slowly lowered his arm and allowed the tavern keeper to turn him around and say, “Leave, sir, leave, please, and I shall deal with it all. I’ll take care of the girl.”
Like an overweight sheepdog herding wolves, he hounded the musketeers to the door and out of it, till they stood outside in darkness, blinking.
“It was damnable, that,” D’Artagnan said, rubbing his face with his hand, as though trying to remove the memory of the scene they witnessed. “Why was she attacking the girl?”
“I think,” Athos said, slowly. “That the girl is her husband’s daughter.”
This had never occurred to Porthos. He’d been busy holding himself accountable for Guillaume’s existence and, somehow, in his mind, thinking that if Amelie was his sister, then she must be Porthos’s daughter also. All of which was nonsense because the child had been born a good two or three years after Guillaume and therefore could not be his. He stared at Athos in shock saying, “How? How? How?”
Athos sighed. “I imagine in the normal manner of such things. The woman, Pigeon, was fulfilling much the same function the children would later serve, helping with serving and running errands in return for some food and a place to sleep in the barn. She was probably a handsome woman, or at any rate more accomodating than his wife…”
“I wasn’t…” Porthos shook his head. “Athos! I am not a child. I wasn’t asking you how it came to pass. I was asking you why you thought so, how you deduced that.”
“Oh. She has his eyes,” Athos said. “Clearly. And also clearly he cares for her as a daughter, more than just a childless man would care for any orphan.”
“Oh,” Port
hos said. His head hurt. He’d drunk the cup of wine from the tavern and he knew from the taste that it was good wine, but it felt heavy in his stomach, like lead. “I think…” he said in a whisper. “I think that Guillaume was my son.”
“Why?” Aramis asked. “Why would you think that?”
“She said… The girl said that her mother was also named Amelie and that her brother told her he’d found his father and that his father was a nobleman.”
“The nobleman!” Athos said. “I knew it.”
Porthos didn’t know it. He looked, confused.
“The nobleman who thrashed him,” Athos said. “It had to be him. I thought it was a little strange that he was seeking work with a nobleman but left after a thrashing. Surely a thrashing would be nothing strange for a waif born in a stable.”
“But… he was my son,” Porthos protested.
“Why would you think that?” Athos asked.
Porthos ticked off the reasons on his fingers. “First,” he said. “He came to me and I’m a nobleman.”
“He’d be more likely to think of you as a musketeer,” Aramis said. “He would say, he’d found his father and he was a musketeer, not a nobleman.”
Porthos shook his head. “I am a nobleman.” He lifted another finger. “Second, he did have my genealogy in his pocket, and of what interest could it be to him, if he was not my son?”
“He could have been intending to blackmail you with it,” Aramis said.
“He never spoke a word about it.”
“He might have been waiting, or he might just have acquired it. Or it might have been put in his pocket by someone else who wished to make it look like you killed him because he tried to blackmail you.”
Porthos sighed. All of that was true, and yet. “The girl, back home, the one my father didn’t want me to marry, the one he told me to leave, which is how I came to Paris, was named Amelie. And the girl there, she said her mother was Amelie. And when I left would be… thirteen years ago. So Guillaume… Guillaume could be my son.”
The Musketeer's Apprentice Page 12