Dreams and Reality; The Unreasonable Behavior of High Noblemen; Going to the Source

D’ARTAGNAN had scarce slept the whole night, and waking to go to guard duty, he’d been less than alert. Now, after a long morning standing in the doorway of Monsieur des Essarts, without even the company of his friends to relieve his boredom, he was even more sleepy. So much so that he thought he was dreaming when he found all his friends assembled in his entrance room, around the table.

Only, their presence didn’t exactly surprise him, since he’d suspected today would be spent in enquiries surrounding the death of the child. Also, it was easy to know this couldn’t be a dream since his scrubbed pine table was as bare of all provisions as it had been this morning when he’d left, and the three didn’t even have wine in front of them.

D’Artagnan pulled a chair and sat on it, and then he wasn’t absolutely sure he wasn’t dreaming, because as soon as he’d sat, Aramis said, “Now we’re all here, and, D’Artagnan, you look like the dead, let us have something to revive us. Holá, Planchet?” And at the appearance of D’Artagnan’s servant, Aramis tossed a coin in the boy’s direction. “Get us wine. Decent stuff. And some bread and whatever meat you can find.”

As the boy caught the coin overhand and grinned, doubtless thinking of his share of the largesse, Athos smiled and asked Aramis, “Another theology book.”

Aramis shook his head. “Not as it would happen. I went to visit Brother Laurence who, as I told you, is a master of herbs and plants and the properties thereof. While I was there and asking about nightshade-of which I’ve brought a sample of its extract, so you can know the smell which Brother Laurence says is characteristic-and he gave me this new formula he’s had from a Gascon and which is rumored to have a miraculous effect on wounds.” He looked at D’Artagnan, whose eyes had widened. Aramis’s own eyes were merry with mischief. “Since we have our own source of that excellent curative, and my having found that de Termopillae had suffered a grievous wound in a fight with the guards of the Cardinal last night…” Aramis grinned. “He was very glad to empty his purse to get his hands on the specific. As it chanced his purse was quite fat.”

At this time, they were interrupted by the arrival of Planchet with an abundance of food and two bottles of wine, which he proceeded to serve. In addition to the bread there was some very good roasted mutton. Three of them ate in silence for a while, but it did not escape D’Artagnan’s notice that Porthos was merely nibbling on a little bread without much appetite.

It wasn’t, however, till they were done eating, and sat in front of newly refilled cups of wine, that Athos said, “I think we must speak of what we found this morning.”

He spoke in carefully measured sentences, of Monsieur de Comeau’s obsession with horses, of his vast stables and many grooms, then frowned. “Before I was done there,” he said, and looked towards Porthos as though worried about the result of his revelations, “I was wondering about the horses, and where money for all those horses comes from. For you must know that feeding that large a stable in the city cannot be easy. They can hardly turn them out to pasture. Even if the lord has a country estate, to which he sends horses in spring and summer, the expense has to be enormous.” He looked around the table, and then Aramis looked back at him with eyebrows raised, saying nothing. Porthos seemed to be lost in some sort of dream or nightmare of his own mind.

“You think he’s being paid by someone,” D’Artagnan said. “That this is the only way he can afford such a large stable.”

Athos inclined his head. His eyes showed that expression they often wore around D’Artagnan-an expression of curious amusement, as though the workings of D’Artagnan’s mind couldn’t fail to amuse him.

“Do you have in mind who could have done it?” D’Artagnan asked, feeling sure that Athos did. It was in Athos’s expression, in the way he was looking at D’Artagnan, as though willing D’Artagnan to voice something he didn’t wish to.

“Many people could have done it.” Athos said. “To begin with, the Cardinal, of course.”

“You mean,” D’Artagnan said. “That he might have done it to implicate Porthos in a crime? It has always seemed a little fantastic, though perhaps it is because I don’t have as much experience of Paris as you do.”

Aramis shrugged, one of his fashionably elaborate shrugs. He glanced at Athos, then turned to D’Artagnan. “Not that it’s impossible. He’s made other plots, just as elaborate, against other people. But normally, when he goes through this trouble, it is against crowned heads and those in power, not…”

“Not Porthos,” Athos said. “This has occurred to me. And yet, if he’s taken on a particular animosity…” He shrugged.

“There is still another objection,” D’Artagnan said.

“That if the lord had that many horses and had it all before the boy first approached him, surely he can’t have been thinking of such a plan.”

Athos shrugged. “It is possible,” he said. “That he has been in the Cardinal’s pay all along, and that the boy coming along merely provided the opportunity for him to render his eminence a service.”

D’Artagnan inclined his head. It was possible. Perhaps it was even likely. Sometimes it seemed that half the court was in the Cardinal’s pay. “But if so,” D’Artagnan said, “how convenient should it be that he found just the right boy to convince Porthos to teach him, and how cold-blooded to seize on any boy-”

“It wasn’t any boy,” Porthos said, in what was for him a roar, and which must have been heard loud and clear by the neighbors on either side. Then he lowered his voice to say, “It was my son.” His face had gone pale, his features wooden.

“Your son?” D’Artagnan asked, now fully convinced this was some bizarre dream. It was all tied with Porthos’s outburst yesterday and none of it made a wit of sense and he-

“Guillaume,” Porthos said, “was my son.” And proceeded to lay the story before them, in what was, for Porthos, almost an eloquent manner. His lost girlfriend, and the something of her he’d detected in the girl, Amelie. And Guillaume, named after the saint who supposedly protected the village at the center of Porthos’s domain, the village in which his manor house was located. “It is a very small village, you understand,” he said. “It is a very small manor house as well. Just a little place at the butt end of nowhere, and nothing like any of you would trouble yourselves with, but… small and humble as it was, it was my father’s domain and yet he thought we were that much better than the peasantry that he would not allow me…” He opened his hands, as though to signify his helplessness. “He said Amelie was common as muck, with no name and no ancestors and no fortune either, and I needed someone with fortune, someone, he said, with something in her stocking foot. He said if I left the domain, he would not do anything to her. Only find her a marriage, and be done with it. But if I didn’t leave, he was going to send her parents from the land, for, you see, they only held the land from us.”

“And so you left,” D’Artagnan said.

Porthos opened his hands in a show of helplessness that, in its way, was a more eloquent demonstration of grief than any number of elegies. “And I’m guessing she came after me, instead of taking the marriage offered,” Porthos said. “I swear by the Virgin and all the saints that I never thought she was that attached to me. If I had known…” He was silent a long time, chewing on the corner of his moustache. “But I would say the chances are very high, if not absolutely sure-and I’d hold it to be absolutely sure-that the boy was mine. And if the boy was mine, my son…” He shrugged.

“If the boy was yours, the wish to injure you might very well have gone beyond a wish to have you taken up for murder,” Athos said, “to a wish to hurt you personally, which brings me again, forgive me Porthos, to the possibility that someone with money…”