Sarah D'Almeida - The Musketeer's Apprentice

The Benedictine’s eyebrows rose again. “You mean, in sum, his eminence Cardinal Richelieu, I suppose?”

Aramis shrugged. “Someone of prominence, whosoever they might be,” he said. “Someone who would not be in a position to run to the garden and cut leaves, or to bake a pie incorporating them. You see, if this child was as I suppose him to be, streetwise and capable, I don’t think he would easily be tempted by a dainty full of poisonous berries. Doubtless he would have tasted them or known them.”

The Benedictine spread his hands again, this time in a seeming show of helplessness. “I always think that you gentlemen in the King’s Musketeers are a little too obsessed with the Cardinal, as though if his eminence were to achieve all his goals France would be lost by it. And yet, I’d swear the man, though he enriches himself a bit, is not even as corrupt as most of our noblemen. He doesn’t seem to crave riches or women or…”

“It is power he craves,” Aramis said. “Just power. Surely you understand that.”

“But a craving for power doesn’t mean the power is necessarily wrong. It seems to me the Cardinal’s aims are as much for the good of France as anyone else’s at court. He might have different ideas as to what that good might be, but that is about it. Surely…”

Aramis shrugged. He transferred the jar to his left hand and examined the nails of his right hand, something he always did when immersed in thought. In anyone else making this speech, he would have suspected a fatal sympathy for the Cardinal, such as might mean Brother Laurence was already the churchman’s agent. But Brother Laurence wasn’t like that. He was one of those creatures who go through life thinking more than doing-and more involved in his studies than in any human affairs. If the Cardinal were an herb, then surely Brother Laurence’s opinion would be soundly and carefully reasoned. The Cardinal, and France and the court for that matter being either people or assemblies of them, the good brother’s opinion would be slightly less well thought out. “I’m not going to dispute with you,” he said. “Whether the Cardinal’s ideas for France are correct or whether the King’s or… other people’s are. I’m just going to say that surely you don’t doubt, in the pursuit of his objectives, the Cardinal would not spare the life of a child.”

“In the pursuit of his objectives,” Brother Laurence said. “The Cardinal would not spare the King himself nor the Queen, but truly… why would he kill a child?”

Aramis shrugged. “As a means of creating the appearance of a crime so heinous that even Monsieur de Treville would not defend one of his own musketeers?” Aramis said. “Besides, you must know if he manages to strike at one of us, myself or my three friends, the rest of us are bound to go into exile or otherwise disappear, for what credit and face would we have, when presented with such dishonor in our midst?”

The Benedictine’s eyes watched Aramis, attentively, then the man shrugged. “You might have good reason there. Or more than good reason. And yes, his eminence is quite capable of such behavior where it suits him, and I won’t dispute it might have suited him. I don’t live enough in the world to understand such impulses and such crimes.”

Aramis nodded. “There are other suspects… other people who might have done it. A nobleman, perhaps one who was the boy’s father or at least whom the boy thought was his father.” He shrugged. “People like that, at that level, unlike housewives or other plebeians, might find it hard to come by the berries and leaves, and might have had to disguise the poison in some other way.”

The brother nodded. “Well,” he said. “Nightshade is called belladonna, because its extract, when dripped in the eyes, makes the pupils huge, something that is accounted of great beauty by our court ladies. There are other preparations that use it. As a cream, it is said to make the skin smooth and even. You must understand I have no personal experience with it in that form, as my patients are rarely concerned with the appearance of their skins, and yet…” He shook his head. “There’s many ways it can manifest itself and many people who make extracts of it.”

“And if someone ate… either the berries or the concentrate of it? How long till death?”

Brother Laurence shook his head. “It might not lead to death at all,” he said. “You understand, it is possible to have it in such a small dosage that it causes only dreams and hallucinations. In adults, at least, most of those hallucinations seem to be of a… sexual nature.”

“Supposing a dosage large enough to kill?” Aramis asked. “In a boy about this height,” he held his hand at below his shoulder. “And weighing very little, though most of it muscle?”

The Brother sighed, then shook his head. “Half an hour? An hour? Not very long at any rate. With that little flesh, it is easy for the entire body to become poisoned very quickly.”

Aramis nodded. Porthos had just had the time to become alarmed at the boy not having shown up for his lesson. That meant an hour, maybe less. And the boy had died shortly after Porthos found him. “So it is not one of those poisons… It wouldn’t be possible for someone to have poisoned him over weeks, or months? Or perhaps to have given him the poison the night before?”

The friar shook his head. “Oh, no. It’s not a slow acting poison at all. If you take enough to poison you, you will die very quickly.” He turned his back on Aramis and started rummaging amid his clay jars on a shelf. “Someone would have had to poison the boy, at the most, a couple of hours before he died.”

“Well, that at least gives us something solid to ask-a person’s whereabouts just before the boy died.”

“Well… indeed. Except they could have given it to him in some flask of liquor or some baked something with instructions to consume it at a certain time.”

Aramis tilted his head. “It is devilishly hard,” he said. “I much prefer murders by stabbing or bludgeoning.” And, seeing Brother Laurence look over his shoulder at Aramis with a startled expression, Aramis added. “I mean, I much prefer trying to solve such murders, not that I prefer committing them that way, for as I hope you know I do not make it my business to kill people.”

“I should pray not,” Brother Laurence said. “Except for your duels, of course.”

“Those are hardly murder.”

“Indeed. I suppose not.” The little friar sighed. “My friend, surely it has occurred to you that having found such a relatively easy way to dispose of inconvenient people, the murderer is bound to murder again?”

Immersed in this gloomy thought, as he left the monastery, Aramis managed to walked all the way into the middle of a group of men, who were waiting a little distance from the door before he realized that they were all dressed in the blood-red uniforms of guards of the Cardinal.

“What can this mean?” he asked. “Were you gentlemen waiting for me?”

The leader, an ugly man with a scar, whose name, Aramis vaguely remembered as Remy, said, “Indeed, and if you just deliver the papers to us, we shall now be gone. We ransacked the house, you see, and couldn’t find it. So one of you must have it. And since there’s a woman involved, it must, perforce, be you.”

Aramis was as baffled by this speech as could be expected. The only thing he could understand from it was that these men wanted some papers. Porthos’s genealogy, he thought. Now that it had failed to incriminate the musketeer, its very existence pointed to the Cardinal. They wanted to eliminate proof.

Mentally he counted them. Five of them. Very well, he would die here, then. He pulled at his sword. “This is the only thing you’ll get from me, sirs,” he said. And then, though he didn’t expect any musketeers to be in this far flung area of town, far from their normal taverns, he yelled. “To me, musketeers. To me for the King.”