The musketeer's apprentice Read Free

of them open to the day. There were anvils with sweating men pounding on them, and there were boys working frantically at the bellows, and there was a nobleman—from the attire—in a corner, holding a nervous white horse who was being shoed by two muscular young men.

    Porthos bit at the corner of his moustache. So—there was a forge. Pray heaven it was the right one. Now . . . from here . . .

    Something about a fishmonger’s. Just down the street. Porthos’s nose led again, till he came to a fishmonger’s in a huge plaza. From there so many roads led on that Porthos found himself quite at a loss. Until he remembered Guillaume admiring Porthos’s new boots and saying that he’d seen some at the cobbler’s on the way here, but that his father would never give him money for them.

    Peering down the streets, Porthos found the cobbler’s. From there, he remembered the boy making some mention of a tavern at the end of an alley and how musketeers sometimes drank there. The boy hadn’t wanted to discuss the tavern much, but he’d told Porthos it was the Hangman.

    From Porthos’s foggy memories of being led by Athos to every tavern in Paris, when Athos was in one of his drinking moods, Porthos found the alley that led to the back of the Hangman.

    He walked down half the alley before he saw the boy. At first, he thought it was just a pile of clothes, though the clothes were purple velvet and the hat had a plume uncommonly like Guillaume’s. It was crumpled against a wall, on the muddy ground of the alley at the back of the tavern.

    But when Porthos approached, his big feet raising dull echoes from the packed dirt, the bundle near the wall stirred, the hat went up, and a flushed, haggard face with bulging blue eyes stared at Porthos.

    “Guillaume,” Porthos said. “What is wrong, boy?”

    The boy looked at Porthos. His eyes were wide and shiny, but didn’t seem to see him. “The angels,” he said. “The angels flying.” He was very red.

    “Oh, here, boy. How much did you drink?” Porthos asked, feeling annoyed with Guillaume and with himself. It was clear the boy had got hold of wine somewhere. Clumsily, Porthos reached for the boy and tried to make him stand, but he only flopped around like an ill-stuffed rag doll.

    Guillaume’s arms moved, outward. “Flying,” he said.

    And here, Porthos was momentarily confused. The boy was flushed, and he acted drunk, but there was no smell of alcohol about him. Could he have gone mad? Or was he ill?

    “Here,” Porthos said, trying to support the boy as he would one of his comrades when wounded or drunk.

    But the boy twisted and convulsed.

    “Thirsty,” he said. “Very thirsty.”

    Porthos, despairing of holding him firm, finally lifted him up and threw him over his shoulder. He would take Guillaume back to his lodgings then call on Aramis. Aramis knew nearly everything and everyone. If the boy was sick, Aramis was the best person to find the boy’s family. Sick or mad, they would need to know.

    Porthos hurried back towards his lodging at a semi-run. The boy, thrown over his shoulder, talked constantly, but not of anything that Porthos could see. “Beautiful,” he’d say. “Angels. Flying. Flying. Birds. The sky is so blue.”

    These words, as they walked through narrow, darkened alleys made the hair at the back of Porthos’s neck stand up. It was as if the boy were talking of some reality only he could see.

    Suddenly he stopped and convulsed, then again. There was a sound like a startled sigh.

    It didn’t surprise Porthos when he put the boy down on the floor of the practice room to find the boy had died. Still he checked it, with a finger laid against the boy’s neck, a hand searching for a heartbeat that wasn’t there.

    At long last, he stood and slowly removed his hat in respect for the small corpse with his wide-open eyes, his expression of surprise.

    Guillaume Jaucourt was dead. Who knew from what? Who knew how to contact his family?