Sarah D'Almeida - The Musketeer's Apprentice

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,” Porthos 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.”

“Porthos,” Athos said, sounding as gentle as he’d sounded to the child in the tavern. “Porthos, do you know how many Amelies there are in France? Does that child look at all like your lover?”

Feeling defeated and miserable, Porthos shook his head. “But-” he said.

“Porthos, my friend,” Athos said. “It is not reasonable for you to think this. It is not… right. You feel guilty over your girlfriend that you left behind. And you feel guilty about poor Guillaume, and the two of them have come together in your mind so that, somehow, you think they must be related, but they are not, Porthos.”

Porthos’s head whirled. He tried to think, as he had before, of Amelie fat and happy, a farmer’s wife with many children clustered around her. But he couldn’t. The image in his mind now was of her working in that miserable inn. Of her giving up on finding him. Of her finding consolation with the tavern master and eventually… He shook his head. “I don’t know Athos. I’m still afraid that is the only reason Guillaume would come to me, that he knew something… Amelie in there says that her mother talked to Guillaume about his father. He must have known something. And why did he come to me?”

“To learn to duel?” Athos asked. “He’d meant to be a gentleman and live like one, and so he wanted to learn to fence? So he could uphold his end in a duel?”

Porthos opened his hands, in a show of helplessness. “The thing is,” he said. “That I can’t imagine why he would find me of all the fencing masters in Paris. Oh, yes, it’s very good to hear anyone say I was the best, and perhaps I was. I know I was very good, but-”

“Chance, my friend,” Aramis said. “And you were good. Chance, is all.”

“At any rate,” D’Artagnan said. “This is not the place for us to have this discussion. The hour grows late. If we must discuss this, and discuss where we will go from here-and I believe we must-let’s adjourn to my home.”

“Mine,” Porthos said. “It’s closer.”

He set out, in the direction of his lodging. Oh, he knew that Athos’s mind was better than his. And Aramis knew Latin and Greek and rhetoric and had a mind that might be better than anyone’s. Even Porthos’s head told him it was foolish to assume that because the girl-waif had the same name as his Amelie they were the same person. Foolish. Idiotic.

But his heart ached over it. He felt it must be true. Guilt. It was what Athos had said. Guilt over Amelie and guilt over Guillaume. It didn’t make them mother and son. But it made them both victims of Porthos’s abominable pride.

He should never have left Amelie behind. A peasant she might have been, but how could Porthos, back then, an illiterate provincial lord’s son, think he was better than her? And Guillaume? Why had Porthos so easily believed that he was a nobleman’s son? A used suit of decent make. Was that all it took for Porthos to think that he was a nobleman?

Porthos hadn’t bothered find out where he came from because he didn’t want to know. He enjoyed the boy’s hero worship of him. He enjoyed the fencing lessons. And he’d not wanted to know more.

Had he known more he could have… offered the boy a post as a servant. He could starve as well as Porthos and Mousqueton. He could have rescued him. And Guillaume would not now be lying dead in Athos’s cellar.

"WHAT do we know, then?” D’Artagnan asked. They were seated in the front room of Porthos’s lodging, the one just up a flight of stairs from the street. It was the most spacious and grand of any of their lodgings, and right now the bits of marble decoration on the wall and the elaborate painted ceiling-all of which had once graced a much grander house, which was now divided into lodgings-felt oppressive in its grandeur. That, and the advanced hour, probably explained why the four friends had been sitting around Porthos’s table, looking sullen and quiet, each lost in his own thoughts and concerns.

Even D’Artagnan’s words didn’t bring the immediate storm of conversation it normally would bring. Instead, they all looked at one another, and Porthos looked solemnly back at D’Artagnan and blinked. “That Guillaume is dead,” he said.

D’Artagnan nodded. And then he tried to briskly move the subject away from the obvious fact of the dead child, a fact he understood caused Porthos to mourn and lament, to something more rational, more clear cut, less steeped in grief. He tried to get them to think of it as a puzzle. “The thing is,” he said. “Who killed him?”

“Did anyone kill him?” Aramis said.

As they all turned to look at him, the blond musketeer shrugged. “It must be said.”

“But… you were the one who told us he had symptoms of poisoning,” Porthos said, his voice dull.

“Yes, but… Poisoning need not be murder. Children eat things by accident all the time. Or out of curiosity. Or simply because they’re hungry.” His green eyes looked into D’Artagnan’s and seemed troubled by one of those rare expressions of concern that didn’t relate to Aramis or to whatever lady held Aramis’s attention at the moment. “Peasant children did, sometimes, when I was growing up. Ate the wrong berry. Or picked the wrong mushroom. It always scared me. Not that I thought it might happen to me, but because some children like me out there…” His voice trailed off, he shook his head, and then when he spoke again it was with his old confidence and self-assurance. “But the truth is that we don’t even know for sure what the poison was. If it was poison.” He raised a hand to stop an objection from Porthos, though none seemed forthcoming. “I think it was nightshade, but I’m not sure, and until I’m sure, we’ll not know how much was needed to kill him, or when it was administered in order to kill him by the time he got to Porthos, or… where nightshade can be got, other than the bushes, or…”