Porthos looked blankly at Athos, his hands still open on the table. Athos opened his hands, in turn, looking as if he couldn’t quite express himself with voice only. “Look, Porthos, Monsieur de Comeau is living well above his means. That usually means one is in the hands of the moneylenders. And if he’s in… If the moneylender has a call on him, he might very well have set Monsieur de Comeau the task of… well…”

Porthos stared for a long time. D’Artagnan’s understanding, of course, had leapt ahead to Athos’s meaning, but he thought Porthos hadn’t understood it, and he knew that Athos’s delicacy would forbid him from saying it more bluntly. “He means-” he started.

Porthos waved his hand, commanding him to silence. “I know very well what he means,” he said, and frowned. “He means that Monsieur Coquenard might well have given money to Monsieur de Comeau for his damned horses, and that as a result he was able to ask him to kill my son, in such a manner that he would die near me and even, perhaps, get me taken in for his death.” He made a face. “And I don’t say you might not have a point. After all, it is true, very true, you know, that cuckolds can have the weirdest turns. And while I don’t think Monsieur Coquenard cares, as such… Well…”

Athos nodded. “You can’t be sure. It’s quite possible he knows of the going ons. In fact, given the way you gain access to her house, and how often, I’d be shocked if he doesn’t. And if he knows…”

“He would hardly make an open fuss,” Porthos said. “Of course he wouldn’t. Because, you know, their kind doesn’t. They might starve their servants, and they might make the most distressing economies, but all in the secret of their houses. What they present to the world…” He shrugged. “And so, you see, I think it is quite possible he would do something like that, by stealth. But… that is not of any great significance. I can ask Athenais, you know?”

“And will she know?” Aramis asked. “It is my experience that often ladies don’t know anything of what goes on under their own roofs, save only if they have enough for their paint pots and their face creams.”

Athos smiled at this-one of his odd, secretive smiles that D’Artagnan had learned meant a secret amusement he didn’t wish to express aloud, either because it would forever blight his friendship with someone or because he thought of it as something best enjoyed in secret and silence.

Porthos, on the other hand, was never a man to keep anything to himself. At least not anything he could berate one of them for. He glared at Aramis. “Aramis,” he said. “You’ve met Athenais. If you think she doesn’t know all the accounts and everything that goes on in her husband’s firm and household, you’re a greater fool than I’ve ever known you to be.”

Aramis opened his mouth to reply. Even in the few months that D’Artagnan had known the three musketeers, he’d become accustomed to these quarrels between Porthos and Aramis. They’d arrive suddenly, progress alarmingly fast, and end with one or the other of them calling out for a duel before the offender apologized.

D’Artagnan felt they didn’t have time for it now, and it was entirely the wrong thing. He glared at Aramis, who seemed so surprised to encounter censure from such a quarter that he stopped with his mouth half-open.

Porthos waited for the answer for a second, and when it didn’t come, he got up, shrugging. “I suppose I’ll go to Athenais, then,” he said.

“Wait,” D’Artagnan said, getting up. And having said it wondered what he was thinking. The words had come out of his mouth so fast that he had no time to decide what had impelled them. It was much, he reflected, with chagrin, like Porthos saying that his mind didn’t know what he knew.

“Yes?” Porthos asked him.

And on that D’Artagnan’s sleep-befogged mind cleared. “What I meant,” he said. “Is that doubtless your Athenais will take some time to look through the books and discover whether Monsieur de Comeau has been receiving money from her husband. And even if she discovers it, because the matter is of such long standing-judging by the lord’s stables-how are you to prove he was involved in killing the young man?”

Porthos’s hands closed, on either side of his body. “If he killed Guillaume, I shall kill him.”

“How?” D’Artagnan asked.

“You can’t challenge him to a duel,” Athos said.

“Indeed, no,” Aramis put in. “His extreme old age protects him from such. And what are you going to do if you can’t challenge him to a duel? What do you intend to do?”

Porthos’s hands unclenched, then clenched again. “If he killed my son, I’ll kill him.”

Athos shook his head. “Indeed no.”

“We’d be very poor friends if we allowed you that course of action,” Aramis said. “It is one thing to kill someone in a duel, but another and quite different thing to kill him by stealth and in the dark, or to kill someone of such markedly inferior strength as Monsieur Coquenard. If you kill him it will be murder, and they’ll execute you, Porthos.”

Porthos was quiet a moment, then frowned and asked, as if the question were difficult to formulate, “I am to allow him to live, then? To go on as though nothing had happened? I know that the Cardinal has many such debts to his conscience and yet goes on living and, such as it is, ruling France. But surely, you don’t expect me to take the murder of my son in the same manner and to-”

“No,” D’Artagnan said. “No. We wouldn’t expect it and, indeed, wouldn’t look for it. Only that… to get your revenge, you will need to involve the law and that will necessitate more proof than the fact that Monsieur de Comeau was indebted to Monsieur Coquenard, because I fancy that hundreds of people are, and are not, for all that, murderers.”

“But-” Porthos said.

“What this means,” Athos said, his voice serious. “What D’Artagnan is trying to say is that we must gather more proof of his guilt.”

“How?” Porthos asked.

“Well, that was what I was thinking of,” D’Artagnan said. “And why I thought I could not allow this meeting to end before I had established it. We must find out why Guillaume had your genealogy, and indeed if it was him who gathered it or if someone gave it to him, and if he got it, at whose request.”

“How can we find out if he was the one who gathered it,” Porthos said, “when he’s dead? And you’re forgetting he went to St. Guillaume du Vallon.”

D’Artagnan inclined his head. “I’m not forgetting it, Porthos. Indeed, I’m not. But just because he went there, or was persuaded to go there, doesn’t mean he was the one who researched your genealogy-a difficult labor for a lad. And tedious, besides.”

“True, but in any case, he’s dead. How will we find-”

“If he went to the village, he stayed with someone and might have talked to someone,” D’Artagnan said. “We should go, all of us, and talk to people and find out what he did.”

“In my lands?” Porthos asked. “In my father’s lands? You want me to go and question my father?”

“Your father,” Athos said, with a speculative tone.

“Athos, it would be monstrous.”

“No more monstrous than things that happen daily,” Athos said.

"But…”

“We must,” Aramis said. “Go, as the Gascon says. We will ask leave of Monsieur de Treville.”

“And I will ask leave of Monsieur des Essarts,” D’Artagnan said.

“And before all of that, I shall go and talk to Athenais,” Porthos said.