“But what do you hope to find?” Athos said.

“Anything, nothing,” Aramis said. “I don’t know. But if her husband did the boy violence, then she might know it.”

Porthos nodded. “This leaves as suspects Monsieur de Comeau, Amelie’s father and mother, my… father and, I suppose, my cousins.”

Aramis nodded. “I should mention,” he said, “that I talked to some people I know this morning.”

“People, you know?” Athos said.

“Mostly people of the female persuasion, I assume,” Porthos said, unable to resist ribbing his friend.

Aramis turned to him, his eyes oddly serious. “I can’t determine that either of Amelie’s parents approached the boy,” he said. “But both of them asked around enough about their daughter. And your Amelie’s father stayed at the Hangman for a while.”

“How did you find this out?” Porthos asked.

“Ah…” Aramis shrugged. “You’d be surprised what mendicant friars see and hear. I simply asked some whose normal station is near the tavern. It was easy enough, by description of her father and mention of where her mother would be from, you see…”

“And my father?” Porthos asked. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Oh, there was no love lost between himself and his father. There hadn’t been for many a year. But the thing was that no matter how much Porthos told himself his father was a boar and a madman with no manners and worse morals, he was still Porthos’s father.

Porthos could remember being a little boy in Marie’s care and thinking his father was the biggest, the strongest and the most wise man in the world too. He remembered seeing everyone in St. Guillaume du Vallon deferring to his father and thinking that he was truly the most important of men. Somehow, the old, cantankerous man who had sent Porthos to Paris and now refused to admit Porthos existed inhabited the same body as the idolized giant of Porthos’s childhood. And he didn’t wish either of them to have committed murder, much less murder of Porthos’s son.

Aramis shrugged. “Your father also looked around, though he must be credited with looking for you first, and then Guillaume. I think he spoke with Amelie. Guillaume’s sister. Other than that, I haven’t found much.”

Porthos closed his eyes and hoped his father hadn’t done anything stupid, but then he had to open his eyes again and go on hoping. He drank the wine in his cup, and nodded, all around. “I shall talk to de Termopillae,” he said.

“I shall go with you,” Aramis said.

“And I,” Athos said, speaking as though he were being asked to sacrifice himself to some unknowable pagan deity, “shall go and interview Madame de Comeau.”

“And I think,” D’Artagnan said, slowly. “That I shall go back to sleep.”

Porthos wondered if the boy was truly still addled from his knock on the head, or whether he wanted to stay home to see if the beautiful wife of his landlord would put in an appearance. Either way, it was a temporary affliction and would surely pass.

A Lady’s Boudoir; The Commerce Stain; The Matter of the Jewels

"WITH Madame de Comeau?” the little maid asked Athos, giving him the once-over with a shrewd evaluating air.

Athos had dressed in his best and least-patched uniform, brushed his hair and tied it back. He held his best hat-the one with the plumes still feathered out and in good condition-against his chest as he spoke. He was aware that he looked, if not regal-it was hard to look regal in a patched suit-at least noble and dignified. He was also aware-had been aware since he’d reached manhood- that there was a certain air he could put on, a certain way of moving, that gave people the immediate impression he was highborn and much too good for his surroundings and their company. He now threw his head back, with just that expression, and the maid gaped at him.

“Does the lady know to expect you, milord?”

Athos shook his head. The woman ran up the stairs, leaving him in a small entrance room. This was a different entrance than the one he’d used with Madame de Comeau’s husband. Athos suspected that this was the main entrance of the house, and the one that normal guests would use.

The entrance room was narrow but long, fashionably tiled in dark green marble. The walls were a pale yellow that looked, rather, like the paint in some Italian noble houses that Athos had visited with his father, in his youth-freshly applied over still-wet plaster and looking, for that, whitish and faded. On the walls hung what looked like very good portraits, cast about with that look of familiarity that denoted ancestors. Athos, noticing one of a cavalier of the time of Francis I-as least denoted by the man’s attire-was quick also to realize that the painting was far superior to the quality then obtaining and, in fact, so different from his own portrait of his own ancestor of that time that the two couldn’t be from the same era.

He would not expend the time needed to walk around and examine all the portraits, but he permitted one of his small smiles to slide across his lips. He thought he understood, and very well, too, that Madame de Comeau’s sin, like Porthos’s was vanity. Only hers rested on a far less stable foundation than the musketeer’s who, for his continued certainty of superiority, required only his own strength and handsome appearance.

From this small room, a staircase climbed, broad, up to a door that had been painted yellow and studded all over with golden nails. Through that door the maid had disappeared and from that door, there now sounded a cackle that reminded Athos-conscious of being ungallant-of the sound of a disturbed henhouse.

Presently, the door opened a mere sliver, and there was a suggestion of someone peeping through the opening. Athos, suspecting it was the lady of the house, trying to decide of his eligibility for an audience, straightened himself and squared his shoulders. The door closed. And a few moments later, it opened again, to let a smiling maid through.

“The lady,” the wench said, curtseying, “will see you now, monsieur.”

She led Athos up the staircase and, at the top, opened the door and announced, “Monsieur Musketeer,” as if this were some sort of title.

Athos entered the room to find it handsomely outfitted with a profusion of chairs, settees and a reclining couch in the Roman manner, upon which a young woman was lying daintily, holding silken embroidery upon which she seemed to have worked an intricate pattern of very diminutive flowers.

Not a man to judge others by their material worth and-being descended from an old and noble house- even less accustomed to thinking of objects as displays of good breeding, Athos was not yet so unworldly that he didn’t recognize, in the large, gilt-framed mirror on the wall, a Venetian masterpiece worth a king’s ransom. This, taken with the new yellow velvet covering the sofas and chairs, and the newly painted walls with their profusion of just-too-new, supposedly ancestral portraits made Athos think to himself that horse trading might be the way to go.

But he said nothing of the kind. Instead, he bowed, with every appearance of respect, and said, “Madame de Comeau. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I am, as your maid said, a musketeer, but my name is Athos.”

This so provoked her that she sat up, from her reclining position, and fulminated him with an almost glare from very fine, honey-colored eyes. “Oh,” she said. “But that’s not a person’s name. That’s no one’s name. That is a mountain, isn’t it? In… Armenia?” She was petite, rather than small, designed on a small frame, but with everything that the most lavish sculptor could want. Her oval face, with its slightly too prominent nose, betrayed more than a hint of Roman blood.

It was a face well adapted to frowning, and while she frowned at him, he bowed hastily. “Madam,” he said. “Few women know that. Few men, even.”