Sarah D'Almeida - The Musketeer's Apprentice

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.”

"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?”