“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.”

To his surprise, four men appeared running. And though one of them was de Termopillae, and therefore as good as half a man, if that, at the very least the odds were somewhat even.

Squaring off against Remy, Aramis thought that the day that four and a half musketeers couldn’t beat five guards of his eminence would be a sad day indeed.

Accidentally Stepping on Bottles; The Very Great Advantage of Knowing One’s Sphere; The Foal and the Lord

ATHOS called for Porthos early morning, and was relieved to find the giant dressed and prepared to go out, polishing off a roast chicken by way of breakfast.

Athos’s stomach clutched at the savory smell and grumbled something to the extent that it had been far too long since Athos had eaten anything of the kind. Which was true. It had been far too long. The nobleman, who had grown up on game meat and, once upon a time, would have disdained the taste of tame fowl, now ate meat, of any kind, but rarely. Somehow, most of his money-and it wasn’t much, as he didn’t like to draw upon the domains he no longer administered for fear his cousin who was taking care of the land in his absence should ask too many questions- received from his musketeer’s pay or the occasional reward for extraordinary service seemed to run away from his hands faster than he could contrive to get it in them.

Truth be told, he knew he played too many games of hazard. He always lost at them and, in his more sane moments, was as likely as the next man to admit that his determined gambling could only be another way of punishing himself-one with his having assumed the musketeer uniform, one with his having cut himself off from all his old acquaintance. He also knew there was too much wine. Far too much. In the last few years, he, who had before always been somewhat more moderate than even a moderate drinker, had swallowed enough wine to float several ships at harbor. And yet… And yet, for all the liquor bought him a certain haziness, and sometimes-rarely-the ability to sleep, it hadn’t managed to erase his perfect recollection of his wife’s look, of the way she’d smiled at him on that day they’d set out together on their last hunt. The same hunt that had ended with his finding that the Countess’s shoulder was branded with a fleur-de-lis, and him hanging her from a low branch. The hunt that had ended her life. And his. In fact if he drank too much, he often thought he spied her ghost, just at the corner of his field of vision. He would turn and not see her, and yet when he wasn’t looking he always knew she was there.