Porthos frowned upwards. The hammer was too high for the result of such a blow to be unconsciousness. Even a casual blow, glancingly struck, would kill a man when coming from that height and endowed with the speed and force of its fall. He could not try it on himself. Of course, he could not try it on anyone else either. Not that he expected to have any volunteers.

So, what was the good of putting a hammer up there, except to prove to whomever came in after him that hammers could indeed be hung up there? None that he could think of.

He frowned at the swords up there. But then, how could Mousqueton have got those swords, again, without getting hold of the shepherd’s crook? Oh, Mousqueton was ingenuous and able, both as a servant and a thief. Porthos had seen him steal bottles from locked cellars and meat from the spit without the owners being any the wiser. But… a sword? Wouldn’t the armorer think it odd, if Mousqueton went to get the crook, to pull out the sword?

Besides, this was an armorer to which Porthos sent Mousqueton often enough. There was no possible way the man did not know of Mousqueton’s sad failings when it came to the eighth commandment. Just like anyone who had a passing acquaintance with Aramis knew of his almost inimical relationship with the seventh. No one in his right mind would allow Mousqueton near his property or Aramis near his wife.

But Porthos knew all this was no good. His friends might believe him. His friends might understand that Mousqueton could not possibly have stolen the sword. But his friends either already understood, or were willing to pretend they believed that Mousqueton was innocent. To strangers, he couldn’t possibly explain how stupid the whole story was.

Well, first because Porthos couldn’t hope to explain much of anything else. His words would get tangled, even if he tried to explain things people already knew or with which they were in utter agreement. But, beyond that, in this case, people would simply tell him that Mousqueton would have asked for the sword, as if to evaluate it, and then killed the armorer with it.

Which was utter nonsense, of course. If Mousqueton asked the armorer for the sword, the armorer was likely to laugh in his face. If it was Langelier’s masterpiece, neither Mousqueton, nor Porthos, nor indeed Monsieur de Treville could have afforded it.

So it left Porthos to figure out-and prove-whether the hammer could be brought down from the rack or not.

He wondered what could make the hammer fall? Shaking the rack, definitely. Taking a deep breath, he took the flat end of the shepherd’s crook, and set about shaking the rack back and forth.

The swords swayed and trembled, and hit each other with an infernal racket, sounding much like a madman loose in a bell tower and having hold of the ropes to the bells. And yet, neither sword nor hammers fell. Porthos hit the side of the rack with the hook, with enough force to set the rack swaying on the chains that suspended it from a ceiling beam.

Through the deafening racket, he barely heard the voice from outside, “Holla! What goes on in there? Who is there?”

D’ARTAGNAN felt oddly excited about going in search of a position as an apprentice or as a day laborer of some sort. Perhaps, he thought, it was that he had never done that. He had come to Paris to look for employment in the musketeers, but he’d come with a letter from his father.

And the letter being stolen, he had yet to obtain that position he had once dreamed of. So, now he would like to try his luck and see if he could obtain another position, without such help or such problems.

Wearing Planchet’s suit, which had, in truth, been made out of the suit that D’Artagnan himself had worn to town and which had been altered to fit Planchet. Of course, now that it had been altered-by Planchet’s able needle-wearing it was akin to wearing a much too long tourniquet. But D’Artagnan could endure it for a few hours. Much harder was the lack of a sword by his side. He kept reaching to the side and finding it bare, and feeling lost, as if he’d left some essential part of himself behind.

It was true, since for almost a year now, he had lived by the sword. The sword earned him the respect of his fellows as well as his income as a guard of Monsieur des Essarts. Now, going into the working class neighborhood, where the houses were either much smaller-and only one story-than even the ones in the area where he lived, or tall, flimsy looking towers where each floor seemed to be inhabited by an impossible number of screaming babies, he realized that people walked much closer to him, and occasionally jolted him.

It was sunset, and women rushed home to prepare the main meal of the day, while their husbands rushed home to eat it, and sons, whether apprentices in nearby workshops or merely street-playing urchins, were called home by the tolling of their empty stomachs. None of these people saw any reason to steer clear of this short young man, with the dark hair and the curiously ill-fitting suit.

As for D’Artagnan he found himself quite at a loss for what to do next. He was not normally of a retiring disposition and since coming to Paris had struck many more friendships than with just his closest friends. And he’d found himself in situations he’d never before faced and made himself known.

But he’d never been in a situation he didn’t quite understand as something other than himself. He’d never had to present both a humble and yet unremarkable appearance. He’d never had to be… common. He understood, as people walked past him without a glance, that even in his childhood days, when he had mingled freely with farmers and merchants and behaved like one of them, they had not behaved to him as to one of their children. He’d always been Monsieur D’Artagnan’s son, and, as that, accorded more respect than he would have otherwise had.

He felt a smile play on his lips, as he thought to himself that he was a fool, lecturing Athos about fitting in, when he, himself, seemed to fit in all too well, and to-thereby-be able to achieve nothing.

And just as he thought this, he passed a small house with a shop. Like most houses in this area, the shop was part of the house, the door open to allow people in and out, even as the business of living went on on the other side of it. Judging by the smell of freshly baked bread, and by the people coming out carrying various forms of bread, the place was a bakery. But what attracted D’Artagnan, more than the aroma, which caused his still-adolescent appetite to wake up and his stomach to growl, was the voice emerging from it-clearly the voice of a father giving orders to a daughter and a son. “Now, Belle, what are you doing? And, Xavier, did I tell you to put that tray there?”

The words were innocuous, save that they were said in the curious mix of French and the Gascon tongue that only transplanted Gascons used. D’Artagnan took a step in the door, almost unable to help himself. The family looked like his people too-or at least like most of the people around his province, even if his father hadn’t been one of them-small and dark, with straight, black hair. It was, for a moment, like looking back at a bakery in Gascony, as he watched the father take a tray out of the oven and swiftly hand the loaves of bread to his daughter who handed them out.

A quick look up discovered D’Artagnan lurking in the doorway, as customers streamed in and out and jostled him as they went. The father of the family looked intently at D’Artagnan, then away as though he’d forgotten him, to shout an instruction to his son to go tell his mother to have dinner done “momentarily,” since they were running out of both baked loaves and customers, as those rushed home with their prizes.