Devotion and Worship; Comfort and Hunger; Where Some Women Are Infinitely Superior to Duchesses

PORTHOS had left the palace before he realized he was doing it. It was his absolute certainty that Hermengarde would come back with no new discoveries, with nothing- in fact-that Porthos didn’t know already.

She would not know who Guillaume’s parents were. Porthos tried to remember all that Guillaume had told him about his family, as he walked. Strangely, for a boy who’d said his father didn’t want him to learn swordplay, he’d never mentioned his father at all. There had been no comments about something his father had done or said. Truth be told, there were no comments about his mother even. The only person the boy talked about was his sister Amelie.

Porthos remembered the name because it had tender associations for him. When he’d been a young man, younger by just a little than D’Artagnan was now, there had been a young woman named Amelie.

Porthos’s father said she was a peasant with her feet in the muck, but to Porthos she’d been kind and gentle, her voice ever pleasing. And though most people in the village treated Porthos as they treated his father-as creatures to avoid at all costs and to lie to when they couldn’t avoid them-Amelie had treated her giant, redheaded future lord as she would have treated a village lad her age.

In the fields, beneath the overspreading trees and behind thickets of berry-heavy bushes, Porthos had learned the first steps in the love of women. And Amelie had learned right along with him, he supposed.

It had come to a bad ending. It was bound to. Porthos’s father didn’t like the idea of his heir being involved with a peasant girl. If Porthos married at all, Porthos’s father had told him, it would have to be later, and it had better be to a girl of some worth. Later, because first Porthos must endeavor to raise the fortunes of a miserable rural backwater of a domain that could hardly support many more generations-what with its peasants leaving, generation by generation, and going to the cities in search of fortune. And to a girl of some worth to increase the chances that Porthos’s grandchildren could still support their title.

Porthos had raged and stormed and his father-just as redheaded, just as large and far more brutish, hardened by a life on the land, a life of seeing his prestige diminish- had raged. They’d clashed and fought and for a time Porthos had entertained running away with Amelie and marrying her somewhere secret. But then Amelie’s father had said he’d send her to a convent and lock her away on bread and water, a penitent the rest of her life. Or, if Porthos would simply leave her alone, they would arrange a suitable marriage for her, and she would be able to go on with a normal life.

And Porthos’s father had threatened to turn her family out unless Porthos left for a while and thus broke the affair off completely.

Threats to him, Porthos could withstand and laugh at. But threats to Amelie made him quake and regret his rash and foolish attachment.

He’d left for Paris before the end of October, and in Paris… Walking along the streets of that town, as evening spun to night and the smell of cooking and of family dinners enjoined around a thousand humble tables mingled on the street, he rubbed the bridge of his nose. In Paris, he’d found his avocation with sword-first teaching sword fighting, and then as a musketeer.

And in Paris he’d met Aramis and Athos and D’Artagnan. Few men, he knew, were so fortunate as to have such friends, brave and capable and as close to him as his own hand or his own arm. But…

But he wondered what would have happened if his father had let him marry Amelie. They would be poor as church mice, doubtless. One of those families with little more to pride themselves upon than the noble ancestors of at least one of them. And heaven knew, even his ancestors weren’t that noble.

They would have gone without food as often as he went without food now. And doubtless, many a time he would have had to work the fields alongside his peasant farmers, clearing land and seeding it. Doubtless his children would be little more than farmers. His children…

He bit at his tongue hard to stop that train of thought, which brought with it a thought of Guillaume and of the parents who would, even now, be worrying about him, the parents to whom Porthos could bring nothing but bad news.

Shaking his head, he realized he’d walked across half the town and that he was now in a neighborhood that was very familiar to him. It was a bourgeois neighborhood of houses that stood shoulder to shoulder, their closed facades keeping behind them the private lives of the residents and their private economies and presenting nothing but solidity to the world.

Up that street and down another, he would come to the garden of Monsieur Coquenard, accountant. And behind the house, the third window on the left was Athenais. A carefully aimed shower of pebbles upon her shutter would bring down the rope ladder through which Porthos could ascend to the closest thing to heaven he was likely to know in his life.

Only… It was too early for that. It was afternoon and everyone would see him.

But his need drove him. It was, like most things that caused him to act and act quickly, something he could neither think clearly through nor even attempt to put into words. Just a feeling. A feeling that Athenais would know what to do. She would make sense of this all. He must go to Athenais.

Because going into her garden and throwing pebbles at her window was out of the question, instead, he went into the alley at the back of her house. He had some vague idea of waiting there for hours, till darkness fell, till the movement in the house stopped, but when a girl came out, headed for the alley, he recognized her as Athenais’s maid, who had seen enough of their meeting in public and private that, if she didn’t know they were lovers she was a worse fool than Porthos was willing to credit.

When the girl saw him, she widened her eyes. Of course, even if he was known, meeting a musketeer in an isolated alley would be alarming for any woman.

Porthos hastened to remove his hat, hold it to his chest and bow.

“Mademoiselle,” he said. “Mademoiselle. I’m sorry to surprise you like this. I meant you no harm.”

The girl smiled and batted her eyelashes at him. She put her hand to her relatively inconsequential bosom with more theatrics than real alarm. “Oh, Monsieur Porthos,” she said. “You scared me.”

He bowed again, deeper. “Pardon me, mademoiselle, only… I wanted to know if you could take a message of mine to your mistress.”

“My… mistress?”

“Madame Coquenard,” Porthos said. Just last week he’d visited and this chit of a girl had seen him. Granted, he’d visited via the rope ladder and his time with Athenais had been scant. Still, he didn’t think anything could have happened to Athenais in a week. At least nothing he would not have heard about.

The maid shook her head. “Oh, the mistress isn’t here,” she said, making Porthos feel as though his heart had just dropped out of his chest and to the muddy ground of the alley.

“Where is she?” Oh, let her not have gone to her parents, who were minor nobility somewhere in the wretched countryside.

“At church,” the girl said. “Only, they had a Mass for a friend of Monsieur Coquenard’s that died last week, and she has gone to attend.”

“Oh,” Porthos said, and hesitated for a moment, not sure how to ask which church.

“St. Magdalene’s,” the girl said. “Just down that way and up the street.”

Porthos followed it before he thought what he was going to do. After all, what could a man do in those circumstances? It wasn’t as though he could barge into the church and there, in the incense-scented decorum of saints and sermons, pull Athenais away for a cozy little chat on murder and the horrors of the lonely life of a musketeer who’d never have children, could he?