"AM I to understand,” Monsieur de Treville asked, frowning, and rounding on Athos, as he entered the office, “that your young friend, D’Artagnan, got himself killed?”

Athos whipped his plumed hat from his head and inclined slightly. In the anteroom he never bothered to remove his headgear, but here, and in the presence of his superior, he had to. “I don’t believe so, Monsieur de Treville. At least Porthos said no. Didn’t you, Porthos?”

He looked sideways towards his redheaded friend, to see him standing there, beside Aramis, his mouth half-open and a look of confused thought on his broad features, as though Athos had just asked him an insoluble question.

Aramis who could be as impatient as any of them with Porthos’s slowness looked shocked at Porthos’s silence. He reached out and shook Porthos arm. “Porthos!” he said. “It is not D’Artagnan who is dead, is it?”

“What?” Porthos said, as though waking. He looked at the captain as though noticing him for the first time, and, whipping his hat from his head fanned himself with it. “No, it’s not D’Artagnan.” He looked around, and homed in on one of the three armchairs that faced a broad desk. He dropped into one of them and only then seemed to notice the surprised look on the face of the captain who remained standing. “I beg your pardon, Monsieur de Treville, ” he said then. “It’s been a hell of a shock.”

For a moment it all hung in the balance. Athos’s memory extended back over the years when they’d all gotten excoriated in this office for small offenses and big, ranging from having allowed themselves to be defeated in a duel by guards of the Cardinal to the recent and horrible time when Monsieur de Treville had been convinced that Aramis had murdered his mistress. For an offense like Porthos’s- sitting down in the captain’s office without the captain’s permission-it could go either way. The captain could laugh it off or he could yell at the musketeer in terms that would peel the skin of an elephant.

The shrewd dark eyes of the captain narrowed as his gaze swept over Porthos. And perhaps because he noticed the musketeer’s unusual pallor, his look of stunned shock, Monsieur de Treville sighed and shrugged.

“Who is dead, Porthos?” he said. “And why do you announce it in my antechamber, thus starting the gossip flowing? ” As he spoke, he walked around his own desk, and sat down in his own chair. He waved to Aramis and Athos. “You may sit down as well, gentlemen, since Monsieur Porthos took the initiative.”

Again there was the little surprised motion, as if Porthos hadn’t fully woken till then. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Shouldn’t I have sat down? What…”

“No,” Monsieur de Treville said firmly. “Never mind that. Only tell us who is dead.”

“My apprentice,” Porthos said. “The boy.”

“What boy?” Aramis cut in impatiently, mirroring the impatience that Athos himself was starting to feel. “We did not have the pleasure of knowing that you had an apprentice.”

Porthos shrugged. “I did not see any reason to tell you since it didn’t involve you.”

Athos waited for Porthos to go on and when nothing issued from Porthos’s lips, he prompted. “Well, will you tell us now?”

“I believe I must,” Porthos said. He sighed. “Since otherwise I might never know who murdered the boy.”

“Oh, so it is murder you’ve alarmed my antechamber with,” Monsieur de Treville said, his voice just caught between amusement and impatience.

This Athos could understand, since Porthos often caused both feelings in him. The gigantic musketeer from Normandy was not, at the best of times, a master of rhetoric. In fact, many of the men who assembled in the antechamber right now took him for a simpleton and marveled that such men as Athos and Aramis associated with him. And most of them attributed their friendship to charity.

But the truth was that Athos-who’d despaired of heaven on that day when he’d left his wife swinging by the neck from a low branch in his domain of La Fere, and abandoned both title and lands to come to Paris and become a musketeer-had very little interest in charity and even less interest in those who were his intellectual inferiors. He knew that in Porthos’s huge head, beneath the wealth of red hair, worked a brain at least as fast as his own and probably faster. Time and again, in difficult situations, it had been Porthos who had cut through the fog of confusion and theories to see the plain truth: a gift far rarer than seeing the complex truth.

It was just that Porthos-who had once been a dance master, who was unequaled with sword, and whose thought could follow complex puzzles-found his way to words difficult and barred, as though his words must reach the world, one at a time through a small slit in a thick wall.

Now, having declared that he must tell them about his apprentice he’d ground again into silence. His huge fingers played with the gold braid on the edge of his hat and he looked attentively down at them, as though hypnotized by their movement.

“Porthos, you must speak,” Athos said, commanding his voice to gentleness. His life had schooled him little in such. His father had demanded much of him, from manliness to courage, but never tenderness and never charity to those weaker than himself. He’d been inclined to it at any rate, as a young man who read much and thought more. But he’d had to leave tenderness and finer feeling behind after his wife Charlotte’s death. After Charlotte ’s murder. “Porthos,” he said again, a little louder, as Porthos turned to look at him. “You must tell us who your apprentice is and why he’s dead and why you’re here.”

Porthos shook his head as though to clear it. “He was Guillaume Jaucourt,” he said. “And he came to me to learn sword fighting. And he died just a little while ago. He’s in my practice room. I’m not sure he was murdered, of course. I think he was poisoned.”

“He came to you to learn sword fighting?” Aramis asked. “In the name of all that’s holy, why? Why would anyone come to you for sword fighting lessons?”

Porthos looked wounded, then shrugged. “You did. Once.”

“You were a sword master then. It is different,” Aramis said.

And Monsieur de Treville’s voice cut in, cold and sensible and holding only the slightest tinge of that amusement that Porthos caused in most people when they weren’t exasperated at him. “Did he know who you were, Porthos? Or suspect?”

Porthos shrugged, then nodded. “He came to me,” he said. “And tried to blackmail me into teaching him,” he said. “He was”-the huge hand was held up at about his shoulder height while sitting-“this tall. A stripling with barely as much width to his whole trunk as one of my legs. Redheaded. Freckled. With pimples starting. And he told me I had to help him learn to fight with a sword or he would tell the world my secret.”

“And you taught him?” Athos asked.

Porthos looked up. Suddenly he smiled. For the first time since he’d come in looking dismal and cold and lost, he looked like himself. “Not because of the blackmail,” he said. “Look, he was a child. Barely twelve. And all of us when we were children, we were subjected to our parents’ whims. My father didn’t want me to learn to read, and Aramis’s mother didn’t want him to learn to fight. And Athos-” he stopped. Their eyes met and Porthos’s smile died away entirely and he shrugged.

Athos wondered what he’d been about to say. Porthos and Athos had never, that he knew, discussed Athos’s upbringing. In fact, of all of them, he was the one who’d been least inclined to speak of his upbringing and background. They might know of the crime that had sent him into the musketeers, to flee his conscience more than anything else. But of the time before that, they knew nothing. Athos was not curious enough to ask. Porthos had an inconvenient habit of knowing the truth. He looked away from Porthos and at Monsieur de Treville sitting judgelike behind his desk.