“Ah,” Rouge said. “They turned Guillaume away too. They were less… less kind than your father, if it’s possible. Amelie’s father had his grandsons beat him and turn him out.”

“Beat him?” Porthos asked.

“Oh, yes. When he came to us, he was bruised and battered. ”

“But… why?” Porthos asked.

Rouge shook his head. “They’ve grown prosperous, Pierre. They’re one of those farmers who’ve grown rich. And with the riches came a certain sort of respectability. The poorer people around here look up to them, and they are hard pressed to admit… you know…”

“That they were common as muck, or that their daughter slept with the lord’s son?” Porthos asked.

“To own the truth,” Rouge said. “Though they never intervened when it was happening, perhaps they didn’t know it, or perhaps they thought you would marry her. But when Amelie started showing, they were very quick to turn her out of doors and disown her, you know?”

“They disowned her?” Porthos said, feeling his anger rage. Oh, his Amelie had been abominably treated, even by her own parents.

“Oh, Lord, man. She never told you, before she died? I thought Guillaume said she only died two or three years ago. She never told you that her parents turned her out and that this was why she came looking for you in Paris?”

“Besides her loving you, which I’m sure she did,” Morgaine said.

Porthos shook his head, dazed.

“Well, her parents did turn her out,” Rouge said. “So I’m guessing even then, though they still hadn’t any riches, they were already looking to their stern respectability. And since then her father has become very… rigid. All his granddaughters dress like nuns and behave like prudes. I guess it has worked, though, because all of them are marrying above themselves, but Lord, what a dreary life it is in that house.”

“Though perhaps we shouldn’t judge them too harshly,” Morgaine said. “Because truth is that they turned him out and beat him, but their conscience must have hurt them because in the next month, first Amelie’s father, then his mother, have gone to Paris. And her older brother just last week. Did you or Guillaume see either of them?”

Porthos shook his head. Amelie’s parents had gone to Paris too… Oh, what might it all mean? Was he obliged, now, to suspect everyone of the murder of Guillaume? And yet, if they were so jealous of their respectability, wasn’t it right to suspect them? Surely they would want to protect themselves against the rumors that they had an illegitimate grandson, even if that grandson was the lord’s grandson as well.

There would have been a time when any peasant would have been proud to say that their daughter had had the son of Monsieur du Vallon-even if illegitimate. There was a time, and it wasn’t far distant, when even Porthos’s father wouldn’t have viewed Guillaume as a young man’s mistake and nothing much to talk about. At worst, the boy would have been taken from his mother and reared, discreetly, by some order of monks or something. He would have been an acknowledged bastard and, failing of a legitimate successor to the name, the acknowledged heir. His existence would no more have shocked anyone than it would have surprised them.

But the times were changing, as was clear by all this newfound prosperity all around Porthos. He chewed on some excellent mutton and thought it over. In the changed world, the lord couldn’t afford a bastard, because he had no way to support him, or any others with similar claims. And if you couldn’t support them in style, you might as well deny their existence.

By the same reasoning, the newly wealthy peasants should have been glad to embrace an offshoot of noble blood. But it seemed impossible for this new class that was forming, these peasants with money, these merchants with connections, to view morality the way noblemen had once viewed it-as something to be aspired to but, enfin, too demanding for fallible man to achieve in this lifetime, without special grace from the Almighty. In this new class, as he knew from Athenais’s own life, respectability was everything, even when it was just a respectability of semblance without true content. And in this new class, it would be worth throwing your pregnant daughter out for having marred the family honor. Wouldn’t it be equally likely that they would kill their illegitimate grandson, before he could embarrass them before the world?

Porthos felt a headache coming on, but there was nothing for it. Rouge and Morgaine paraded before him their eight children-seven boys and a girl, the youngest, as pretty as Morgaine and full of graces that had once been reserved to the daughters of the nobility.

And it wasn’t until they, all four of them, were shown to the guest room at the back, with its warm-burning fire, its beds with sheets aired and turned and warmed by the fire, that Porthos dared speak to his friends. “It’s hard,” he said, “not telling him the truth.”

Athos-always understanding-inclined his head. “I guessed it would be,” he said. “But Porthos, you may come back and tell him the truth, if you wish, once we know the whole thing. For now, do you really want everyone in the village to know it? Do you want Amelie’s family on their guard before we ever meet them?”

Porthos shook his head. “But Rouge is trustworthy. And though you, Athos, would say that no woman is trustworthy, I would guess that Morgaine is also reliable.”

“Oh, it’s not your friends that frighten me,” Athos said, lowering his voice. “But with all the servants and possibly young relatives-I never understood exactly who all the servers were-coming and going around us at table, I would bet every single thing we said, and every expression, will be all over the village in no time at all.”

Porthos nodded. It would be hard to dispute that. He knew it for the absolute truth. Soon everyone in the village would hear everything they had said.

“But the boy came here,” Porthos said. “And told them that Amelie and I had married before she died and that…”

“It is my guess,” D’Artagnan said, speaking quietly from where he was sitting on the bed and removing his boots. “That he came here before he had found you. It is my guess that he came by in the full assumption that you had died-”

“That I had died?” Porthos asked, with some confusion.

“Yes,” D’Artagnan said. “I would assume he thought you were dead, because his mother had looked for you so long in Paris, and yet hadn’t found you. What would be more logical than to think you had somehow died?”

“Oh.”

“Indeed,” Athos said. “And everyone in the provinces knows that life in Paris is full of dangers for those who live by the sword. You might have been killed in any of a dozen duels, any of a hundred skirmishes.”

“Oh, nonsense,” Porthos said. “Why would I die of something like that. It would take a fool to be killed in Paris. Or at least someone luckless or unable to fight ably with the sword. Neither of which I am.”

“But Guillaume wouldn’t know that,” Athos said. “To him you would be nothing more than his mother’s recollection of her childhood friend and lover, someone who had come to Paris and disappeared. He probably thought you dead.”

“And thinking you dead, he thought the most logical thing was to claim that you’d married his mother. Who could trace among the several parishes in Paris, whether you’d actually married or not? Any parish priest might have married you,” D’Artagnan said.

“And the records might easily have got lost afterwards,” Athos said.

“And as such,” Aramis said. “He could claim to be your legal heir and claim your portion.”

“It must have shocked him,” Athos said. “When Rouge and Morgaine told him you were still alive. Fortuitous they got it across before he’d given himself away by proclaiming you dead.” He gave Porthos the weary eye. “Did you write to them and tell them you were joining the musketeers? ” he asked. “They seemed to know it.”