“I didn’t corrupt her,” Porthos said. “I loved her.”

“Funny love, then, that runs off to Paris, leaving her embarrassed. I figured I’d send her to Paris and she could find you and marry you. Or not. It’s not my fault she didn’t find you.”

Porthos opened his mouth and closed it. Aramis wondered whether the telling words in that sentence had had any effect on him. Porthos was both complex and astonishingly simple. It was quite possible he had taken no more notice of those words than any others. As it was possible, too, that he had remarked them all too well and knew precisely what they meant. Whichever way that went, he seemed, for the moment, struck speechless.

“I had the boy beat and thrown out of doors. I don’t know what he wanted, but I know that it took me a devil of time to convince the other boys he’d been some mad fool with nothing to do with them. He came in claiming to be your son and… hers. And hers. And now, how I’ll undo the damage of your presence…”

“There is no damage,” Athos said. “If only you’ll tell us why you, and, yes, your wife, then visited Paris several times, including I believe last week?”

The farmer seemed to choke on something. “Why we visited? Oh, to do business, for as I told you, we are prosperous now, and we can travel to Paris on business. If you care to ask, you’ll find we visit Paris several times a year. Is this forbidden to the likes of us?”

“Not at all,” Athos said, though his entire demeanor proclaimed he didn’t believe a single word from the man.

As they walked away-without turning their backs, because Aramis judged these were just the sort of people who would do them an injury if they could-the gate slammed forcefully and there was a raised din of men’s voices and dogs, but no one came out.

After a while they turned around and led their horses away.

“He wasn’t telling the truth, you know?” Aramis asked Porthos.

“Aramis, I know you have no high opinion of my intelligence, but pray believe me, I am aware that he wasn’t telling the truth about merely visiting Paris on business. I would bet he went to ferret out Amelie’s whereabouts. And Guillaume’s.”

“And found them,” Aramis said, piqued at being told that he considered Porthos stupid, which was not true. “For else, how would he know you never married Amelie? That would take more than merely looking at parish records. You would have to find Amelie and know how she was living.”

Porthos face darkened at this. “If he found her,” he said. “Then he found his own granddaughter, of the same name, living under pitiable conditions. And he did nothing to rescue her.”

Aramis opened his mouth, but did not know what to say to this.

Porthos turned around, “I have half a mind to go back and-”

“No,” Athos said. “No. Now let us find who is guilty of murdering Guillaume. And then we shall worry about Amelie’s situation. Come, Porthos. You must be patient. For the sake of completeness, let us find what Guillaume told the curate in this parish, that allowed him to copy your family’s records. And then we shall be on the road to Paris, where we’ll endeavor to trace the movements of Amelie’s father and mother.”

Recognition and Identity; Ancestral Tombs; Cousins and Confusion

IT didn’t surprise D’Artagnan that Aramis took the lead when they reached the church. Among the four of them, they would easily have agreed that churches were Aramis’s special domain.

None of them would have disputed that an occasion that called for Latin, or candlelight, for theology or musty disputations against the number of angels, should, by necessity, involve Aramis. It was like saying that any occasion that caused for an intimate knowledge of the functioning of great noble houses or ancient Greek history would call for Athos; or that a facility with border Spanish and an ease of melding amid those common as muck should be left to D’Artagnan; or even that anything needing the application of Herculean strength and the sort of mental disposition that cut through all sorts of rhetoric would belong to Porthos.

That the church was a small building of huge stones with almost no windows, built in the Roman manner-the sort of church where an entire village could pile in during a war or a a sack and survive well enough-didn’t seem to matter. Aramis advanced, in his fashionable clothes, his soft, loose venetians, his fashionably cut doublet with hanging ribbons and satin trim. When he removed his plumed hat of the musketeer-with which, at any rate, he could never have entered the low door of the church-and advanced into the shadows, his golden hair glimmered like sunlight.

The church smelled of must and long-enclosed spaces, in which generations had crowded and sweated and prayed. The altar was no more than a small cube of time-darkened boards. Upon it, a cloth lent an air of grace, only barely spoiled by the fact that the cloth itself was dusty with time and fraying at its edge.

Behind the altar, a crucifix displayed the hanging Christ, with the curiously distorted proportions of earlier centuries and a profusion of wounds and blood on His pale-painted limbs. The face, anguished above the misshapen body, looked strangely human and realistic, contorted with a rictus of suffering beneath the head, crowned in thorns.

Aramis walked in, and genuflected to the Christ, before clearing his throat loudly, causing echoes to chase each other into the small church. A small man, brown like a nut-the curious brown of small people shrunken by age and tanned by the sun-and crowned with silver hair, emerged from within a little chamber to the side, doubtless the sacristy. He looked at the four of them-all of them clutching plumed hats to their chests-as though he’d never seen such hats or such men. In fact, as though he lived in a completely different world, populated perhaps with angels, or perhaps with more humble creatures who lived day to day, and more close to the land.

“Oh, Father, we’ve come on an errand of enquiry,” Aramis said. “We wish to know-”

But the priest was looking past them, to the giant Porthos, standing taller than any of the others and looking as if he wished he could shrink his bulk to the church’s proportions. The priest’s glance slid over Porthos, clearly not recognizing him, and looked away, and back at Aramis.

“Any way I can help you, my son,” he said, and continued looking at Aramis as though Aramis were an amazing creature, perhaps an apparition of miraculous nature.

“There was a boy who came,” Aramis said. “No more than a few weeks ago. Looking for information about the lord’s family.”

“Oh,” the priest said, and smiled. “The lord’s grandson. He told me. He said the lord didn’t receive him, which is a pity. Very proud all that family. Very proud.”

Porthos had sidled away from the group to where a tomb stood, carved in rock, displaying, atop its bulk, a knight, crudely carved, lying with his hands joined at the chest. Though the carver who had executed the work displayed no more skill than would have been needed to shape stones for construction, something about the knight-its massive proportions, its huge hands-seemed to speak of a familial relation with Porthos.

D’Artagnan hedged after him, even as Athos and Aramis followed the priest into some back room of the church.

Porthos was running his finger, pensively, around the carved boot of the knight, presumably his ancestor. He looked up to meet D’Artagnan’s gaze, as D’Artagnan approached, and D’Artagnan was surprised to see the grey eyes glisten with tears.

“The priest doesn’t know you,” he said, in a casual tone. “Was he installed after you left?”

Porthos shook his head, and something very much like a small smile twisted his lips. “Oh, no,” he said. “He’s the priest who baptized me, but I daresay he rarely sees my father. He would be more likely to recognize me if he saw him.”