Sarah D'Almeida - The Musketeer's Apprentice

But he had not a moment to feel awkward, as Rouge was grabbing at both his hands, and presently pulling the unresisting Porthos into a joyous embrace and pounding on Porthos’s back in a transport of excitement. “ Pierre, you fool,” he said, in turn.

Porthos stepped back and blinked. “Rouge,” he said. And with a look to the side. “And Morgaine. You haven’t changed.”

“Neither have you,” Morgaine said saucily. Her tongue had always overrun her. “Despite that uniform of the musketeers, which I must say becomes you very well.”

“Uh… Your clothes become you well too,” Porthos said.

And at this, Rouge let out a peal of laughter. “Indeed. Everything has prospered since my father died, Pierre, everything.” He looked behind Porthos’s shoulder at the men standing in the doorway and said, “But we are being veritable rabble, not bringing your friends in.” He called behind his shoulder, “Jean, Francois, go and get these gentlemen’s horses, and take them to the stable.”

“We’ve brought our own servants, Rouge,” Porthos said. “If your boys show them the stables, they’ll take care of the horses from there.”

“Certainly,” Rouge said. “Oh, certainly.” He turned to two teen boys who’d appeared running. “You heard that, you rascals? Go and help my guests’ servants. And you, gentlemen, come in, do come in.”

Porthos turned to see his friends enter the house, removing their hats. “Rouge,” he said, “allow me to present you my friends. Athos and Aramis, his Majesty’s Musketeers, and D’Artagnan, a guard of Monsieur des Essarts.”

Rouge bowed. “My home is honored by your presence, gentlemen. Please, sit, sit.” He gestured towards the table and they took their places around it. “Morgaine, get them some wine and some bread and whatever meat we might have cooking. Quick, my dear.”

Morgaine scrambled off to obey-which mostly seemed to entail calling to various wenches and helpers. Soon there was a flurry of young females setting plates and food and mugs of wine on the table.

“You’ve done very well for yourself,” Porthos said. “You astonish me. I thought for sure the house and mill had been sold and strangers come in.”

Rouge smiled. “Oh, no, not at all. It’s just, when my father died, and as Morgaine was then with child for the third time, I thought I would need to keep my family better. And perhaps arrange for something better for my sons than tending a mill in a small town. And, you see, I had the idea of arranging for the mill to-besides grind the grain- bring up water from the stream and irrigate our fields. And then, you know, farmers paid me for the service of getting water to their more distant fields, and they could suddenly cultivate many lands that had lain fallow. And then they needed more mills to grind the increased grain. St. Guillaume is doing very well indeed, Pierre. Very well indeed.”

Porthos thought it was true, and he’d often heard that the commoners were rising in lifestyle and power even as the old nobility sank. But he’d never thought to see it here or to see it so clearly. “But,” he said. “I saw no signs of all this when I was crossing the village.”

“Well, you wouldn’t, would you? Those are mostly serfs and… well… directly under your father’s authority. The changes and the prosperity are mostly in the outlying farms and those claiming new territory from the forest. Pierre, when you inherit-”

“I’m not likely to inherit any time soon,” Porthos said, dolefully. “We just went to the house, just a few moments ago, and the way my father… well… He challenged Aramis for a duel, which I obliged him to decline, because what if he killed him.”

Rouge looked like he was going to say something, then sighed. “This is the strangest thing of all, Pierre,” he said. “You showing up unannounced, like this, and your father furious at you.”

“This I’ve experienced,” Porthos said. “What I don’t know is why.”

“Well, when your son came to town, your father said… He said you were dead to him.”

“My son?” Porthos said. “You saw him? How did you know him for mine?”

"HOW could we not know he was yours?” Morgaine answered. She set a loaf of bread and the knife to cut it on the table, then sat down next to her man and held his hand while she looked at Porthos with wide and astonished eyes. “He looked exactly like you did at that age.”

“He did?” Porthos asked, with some surprise, because it had never occurred to him that Guillaume had looked like him. And he’d never thought of himself as the boy had been-a gracile stripling, agile on his feet.

“But yes,” Rouge said. “Same body type, same features, the same way of speaking, even. Well…” He grinned. “He is perhaps a little more fluent than you were at his age, and not a surprise, since you lived in the dreadful expectation that your father would violently disapprove of anything you might say, while he surely didn’t grow up with such a fear.”

From Rouge’s smile, from his look, it was clear that he thought he was making Porthos a compliment. It was clear he didn’t know that the boy was dead, much less what his upbringing had been. Part of him longed to tell Rouge all, just as he had told him everything as a child. Rouge had often been the sounding board for Porthos’s discontents and confusion. Though he was only a miller’s son, Rouge had been sent to the local priest for his first letters and from that point had found much to read and write-scraps of this and bits of that-around which he wove stories and explanations for their lives and their difficulties. All of which meant that he could usually better express himself and express Porthos’s own discontents in terms that Porthos could never find. He had, in fact, been much as Aramis now was to Porthos. And yet, Porthos knew that he must not tell Rouge anything. Not yet. First, he must ask questions, while Rouge was unaware of what was happening.

“I never thought of his looking like me,” he said, simply.

“I daresay,” Rouge said, thoughtfully, “that you didn’t spend much time looking at yourself when you were growing up, so it would be more readily noticeable to us. But trust me, Guillaume will look just like you when he grows up and grows into his height and muscles.”

Porthos thought of Guillaume, lying cold and dead in Athos’s cellar, and his throat knotted up again. Aramis, who was looking at him, must have perceived this difficulty, and his thought must have been parallel, because he charged into the breach with his considerable aplomb. “So, Guillaume came here, did he? You saw him?” he asked, casually, as though it were all one thing.

“Oh, yes,” Rouge said. “He came here. He got a ride with a peddler who was headed this way, and really, Pierre, if I didn’t know you, I would have been shocked. No other father would think to let a young man of some address, let alone nobility, travel on the back of a peddler’s cart like a tramp. Surely…”

“I didn’t know what he was up to,” Porthos said. “He came of his own accord, on his own head. You know how boys are.”

“Aye,” Rouge said, and grinned. “I remember some scrapes we got into ourselves, and I daresay our fathers would have given us a good hiding if they knew the half of them.”

Porthos nodded.

“So he came in,” Aramis said.

“Well, I thought Pierre knew,” Rouge said, confused, looking around the table. Then he looked back at Porthos. “Is that why you came? To find out what he did while he was here? Is anything wrong?”

Porthos shrugged. “Not as such. It’s just… I can’t get him to give me an account of his adventure,” he said. “And considering the results I’ve already seen in my father, I thought…”