Sarah D'Almeida - Dying by the Sword

And just as he thought this, he passed a small house with a shop. Like most houses in this area, the shop was part of the house, the door open to allow people in and out, even as the business of living went on on the other side of it. Judging by the smell of freshly baked bread, and by the people coming out carrying various forms of bread, the place was a bakery. But what attracted D’Artagnan, more than the aroma, which caused his still-adolescent appetite to wake up and his stomach to growl, was the voice emerging from it-clearly the voice of a father giving orders to a daughter and a son. “Now, Belle, what are you doing? And, Xavier, did I tell you to put that tray there?”

The words were innocuous, save that they were said in the curious mix of French and the Gascon tongue that only transplanted Gascons used. D’Artagnan took a step in the door, almost unable to help himself. The family looked like his people too-or at least like most of the people around his province, even if his father hadn’t been one of them-small and dark, with straight, black hair. It was, for a moment, like looking back at a bakery in Gascony, as he watched the father take a tray out of the oven and swiftly hand the loaves of bread to his daughter who handed them out.

A quick look up discovered D’Artagnan lurking in the doorway, as customers streamed in and out and jostled him as they went. The father of the family looked intently at D’Artagnan, then away as though he’d forgotten him, to shout an instruction to his son to go tell his mother to have dinner done “momentarily,” since they were running out of both baked loaves and customers, as those rushed home with their prizes.

The boy, probably only a couple of years younger than D’Artagnan, vanished through a door at the back, and the father and sister continued dispensing loaves, till eventually all the loaves were sold and the late-arriving customers went away empty-handed. Then the father strode towards the door, clearly to close it.

D’Artagnan, waking from his revery-in which mingled memories of his mother, his father and the servants who had helped raise him, all scented with his longing for home, and the melodic syllables of that Langue Gascona, which had been his first speech-nodded to the man, politely, and took a step back.

But the baker, his hand on the door as if to close it, darted the other hand out, and grasped D’Artagnan’s arm. “Hold, lad,” he said. “Hold.”

D’Artagnan looked back, and realized only as the man patted his shoulder and said, “Don’t be afraid,” that his look of shock at being thus unceremoniously held, had been mistaken for fear.

“Don’t be afraid,” the man repeated, and shook his head. Then, looking one way and the other down the street, said in a low tone of voice, “Are you hungry?”

D’Artagnan was hungry. Famished, in fact. Strangely, Monsieur des Essarts paid his guards far more regularly than King Louis XIII, with his permanently entangled finances, did. But that meant nothing, when it all came down to it. The pay of a guard was never enough, not once his servant’s upkeep and his own, and the inevitable drinking bouts with his friends, were taken into account.

The last time D’Artagnan had eaten fresh bread had been when Mousqueton had brought a couple of loaves and sworn they’d been lost by someone on the street and he’d simply picked them up. And he could smell, now that most of the loaves were gone, the meal being prepared for the family-hints of garlic olive oil, and the unmistakable odor of meat.

But he knew he was not hungry the way the baker meant, and the part of D’Artagnan who was the son of a seigneur, an armed man, entrusted with both protecting and looking after peasants, bridled at the thought that he had been confused with one of the urban poor, one of those unfortunates who needed food, or would perish of hunger.

Caught in this stream of conflicting emotions, he found himself as unwilling to speak as Athos, as clumsy with words as Porthos, and could only shake his head.

The baker frowned. “Proud, aren’t you?” he asked. “Proud like the devil, and never had to ask anyone for anything back home, did you? No doubt your father does well enough as a farmer or a tinker, or whatever, and you never knew one day of stomach-churning hunger. Aye. I remember my days, when I first came to the capital. My father…” He shrugged. “Too many of us at home, and I’d guess you know that too, no, boy?”

D’Artagnan, an only son, nodded mendaciously, and the man continued volubly, in a low, paternal tone. “Look, there is no shame in it. I was never hungry, not once, not for a moment, when I was in my father’s house. He was a baker, see, and the bread we ate might be stale, if times weren’t so good. But there were always vegetables from the back garden, and a chicken now and then. And then I came to Paris. The things you hear of Paris! Everyone is wealthy and eats beef every day. I thought, of course, I would live like a nobleman.”

The man shook his head as though at youthful folly. “Ah, idiot child that I was. But you see, in Paris, I didn’t know anyone, and before I got myself an apprenticeship at a bakery and saved enough to open my own…” He shrugged. “I was hungry many times. Lodgings had to be paid, as had food. An no vegetable patch in the back.” He patted D’Artagnan’s shoulder with a hand that left white streaks of flour. “But there, there were other Gascons. Like you, I would be called by the language and stand there and listen to it, because it reminded me of home. And Gascons look after each other. Have to, since our cursed land has always produced more boys than food, and more rocks than both.”

D’Artagnan, pummeled by the flow of the man’s generous talk, could only swallow, and smile, and manage to speak in a small voice. “I’m not hungry,” he said. “I mean, not that hungry, though your bread smells very good.” And though he was aware that he should, truly, exploit this opening and find out what he could about the death of the armorer, he could not bring himself to do it. He’d feel as if he were taking advantage of a kind, generous family. “And I was… thinking of buying some, only I was listening to you speak, you know… our tongue, and I forgot…”

The baker smiled. “Buy it, were you? With what coin? No, please, don’t tell me more lies, lad, there is no need.”

The huge hand grabbed D’Artagnan by the shoulder. “You’re hardly older than my own son, and even if you’re more sturdily built, I know what you eat like at your age. I tell you what, if you’d do us the honor.” As he spoke he pulled D’Artagnan into the shop and closed the door behind him. “If you’re not that hungry, just come and give us the pleasure of your company, Gascon to Gascon, and eat at our table tonight.”

To that, there was nothing D’Artagnan could oppose and he let himself be led, by the shoulder, through the dark doorway at the back into a small, crowded kitchen where there stood what seemed to be an overflow of flour barrels, other barrels and bundles of miscellaneous supplies, a small, dark wooden table, and a huge hearth, at which a dark, plump woman worked.

She turned at their entrance and seemed to take it as normal that her husband should come in with some waif off the street. The two children, boy and girl, were already seated side by side at the table, with a bowl of soup and a piece of bread in hand, and squirmed aside to make space for D’Artagnan as a matter of course.

D’Artagnan wondered whether the baker did this every day and how many waifs he fed. As he took his place beside them, he found a piece of bread and a bowl, overflowing with vegetable soup with some small pieces of what appeared to be pork dropped in, were set in front of him.