The musketeer's apprentice by Sarah d' Almeida Read Free Book Online Page B

what was more than just the absence of words, like certain nights are darker than merely the absence of light would warrant.

    Aramis looked up and saw Athos’s face set and serious. “You know much about poisons, Aramis,” he said, slowly.

    Aramis raised his eyebrows. Sometimes Athos’s reactions were unaccountable, though the Gascon, too, was looking pale and drawn and suspicious.

    “You don’t think I killed the boy,” he said, heatedly. “What reason would I have had to—”

    Athos shook his head. “I never thought that,” he said. “But I wonder what part of your upbringing had to do with learning poisons and why this was thought necessary.”

    “When I was a very young man,” Aramis said. He avoided looking at his friend because if he did he would have to take offense and he didn’t want to call Athos for a duel. “In fact, about the age of this poor child, I was, for six months, apprenticed to a Benedictine monk who believed in the practice of charity by more visible means than the disbursement of wealth. He treated illnesses through herbal remedies and at his knee I learned the use of herbs to heal, and their counterpart, the ill effects they could have if misused. ” And, unable to repress his malice, he looked up at Athos’s chiseled features set now in mild surprise. “Why did you think I’d learned, Athos?”

    The older musketeer colored, a rare event and a striking contrast between the blood flooding his cheeks and his normally marble-pale skin. “The Vatican,” he said, not making much sense. “And power within the church. One hears . . . stories . . .”

    Aramis grinned, suddenly. He never knew from whence Athos’s fears and suspicions came, but unlike D’Artagnan’s or Aramis’s own, they usually echoed from some deep well of suspicion learned from a book in some library in forgotten childhood. “Indeed, one does,” he admitted to Athos’s murmur. “But the stories one hears aren’t meant to apply to everyone who enters the church. It has never been said that the men in the hierarchy of the church are better than other men, only, one hopes, aided by grace. And, Athos, when I take the habit, if I become hungry for temporal power, I’ll have better means to advance than poisoning those in my way.”

    “That I believe,” D’Artagnan said, with the sound of an exclamation that escapes the speaker unawares.

    Aramis nodded at the young man. “And that you might. But the thing is, I have reason to believe, from his skin still being very dry, that he died of belladonna. This can’t be sure, but I’d wager it.” As he spoke, he started looking through the corpse’s attire.

    “Aramis!” Porthos said. “Surely you don’t mean to search him.”

    “Surely I do,” Aramis said.

    “But his family!”

    “We must find his family. And there is no one to tell us who they are or where they live.”

    “He said his name was Guillaume Jaucourt.”

    “A name none of us has heard. Porthos let me look. A letter, or some trinket with a coat of arms will get us that much closer to restoring this child to the relatives who, for all we know, search for him in vain even now.”

    But the doublet had no hidden pockets. It wasn’t till Aramis patted the corpse down—gently as though some part of him feared waking the child—that he found, beneath the edge of the doublet a leather purse. And within the leather purse . . .

    Aramis removed the purse and the tie that held it at the child’s waist, and went through its contents.

    There was only a sheaf of pages, looking like paper that had been scavenged a bit from everywhere at random and cut or torn into random sheets. The top of the first one read in the uncertain, scrawled handwriting of a child just learning to write, “The genealogy of Monsieur Pierre du Vallon.”

    This was enough to raise Aramis’s eyebrows and peak his attention because if very few people in Paris remembered Porthos’s family name, even fewer had