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

perhaps ask around here? Within the distance a boy might run here? Porthos, where did you find him?”

    “Down the alley,” Porthos said. “Past the smithy and the flowering roses that spill over the wall. There’s an inn there, or at least the back wall of it. The front door faces the street on the other side. He was sitting against the wall and he seemed to be dreaming with his eyes open.” He wished he knew, if it truly was poison, how long it would take to act, and how far the boy might have come. He didn’t know how to put these thoughts into words.

    Looking down at the boy hurt. Though he’d been dead a little while now, and though he looked pale, it was not so much the look of one dead as of a child on the verge of falling asleep. The eyes looked up at the ceiling, blankly, and there was no sign of anguish. If one looked at him long enough, there was the feeling he would presently get up and smile and say wasn’t it a good joke, and hadn’t he fooled them all.

    Porthos was used to his corpses having more blood on them, or more signs of violence. The boy looked like he’d been stunned, not killed. And yet Porthos was not a child. He knew what dead meant. This was no prank. There would be no waking up, no talking, no more fencing lessons. There would be nothing, now, for Guillaume.

    With a pang, Porthos realized he would miss the boy, and let a heavy sigh escape him. As Aramis looked in his direction, he said, “ Sangre Dieu ” and for once Aramis did not scold him for the blasphemy, just inclined his head and said nothing.

    At that moment, Bazin came in, with a wooden box which, upon opening, contained several sheets of paper and some dark sticks of what appeared to be charcoal of different tones. Porthos moved nearby to watch Aramis work. The younger man’s fingers moved quickly over the page, drawing a likeness of Guillaume with what appeared to Porthos like divine ability. The boy’s sharp nose emerged, and his slightly too square chin. You could tell if he’d grown to his full size and maturity he would one day have been a square-jawed man. You could see his face would have gained bulk and a certain solidity.

    Porthos looked away as the scene had become inexplicably shaky. It was possible his eyes were full of tears, but he’d refuse to admit it. Instead, he swallowed hard, and swallowed again, and looked at the door, which was ajar, allowing only a sliver of light in.

    Presently, he heard Aramis close his box of drawing materials, saw Bazin take it, and heard, without being fully able to understand it, Aramis give instruction to Bazin on where to find a coffin and Athos give instructions to the ever-silent Grimaud, his servant, on where to put the coffin in the wine cellar.

    He wasn’t aware of the servants leaving, but they must have left because when Aramis tried to hand Porthos one of the pieces of paper with the boy’s picture, the servants were no longer there and D’Artagnan and Athos were standing by the door and looking back at Porthos with the worried expressions of people standing by a sick bed.

    Porthos disciplined his face to show no emotion. So the boy was gone. So he would never grow up into the brave, determined man he’d promised to be. How many boys had died too young since the world had begun? It didn’t bear thinking about.

    One glance at the picture Aramis had drawn showed him, as it were, Guillaume brought to life momentarily, with an expression of self-confidence in his eyes and the slightest of smiles on his lips.

    Porthos rolled it carefully and held it in his hand. It didn’t bear looking at too much.

The Differences Between a Pedigree and a Baldric; The Differences Between Murder and Friendship

    ARAMIS knew Porthos well enough to be alarmed at his friend’s reactions. Grief for the boy, he could understand or almost understand. But there was a seething rage in Porthos’s look; a sense of fury being held barely in check.

    It was not natural in Aramis,