On the bottom floor, there was a dining room, and the kitchen at which Grimaud’s labors often managed to produce meals that could have graced the kitchen back at La Fere -meals that were, more often than not, wasted on the master who would have preferred to drink his dinner.

As Athos was about to set his feet on the steps, he heard a voice say, “Monsieur, monsieur. I have bound wounds before. Please do not tell me how to do it.”

The voice was undeniably Grimaud’s, and undeniably it spoke the truth. Athos’s first thought was that one of the servants had got wounded and that Grimaud was binding his wound, while discussing it with the other servant. Perhaps, in fact, Mousqueton had escaped the Bastille, through either cunning or luck, and was wounded, and this wound Grimaud was attempting to bind. But there was no possible way their servants-by now as much comrades at arms as they, themselves were-would call each other monsieur.

They perhaps liked Bazin a little less than the other three, but even he would never be addressed as monsieur. They called him Bazin, and might roll their eyes at his pious pronouncements, and yet they did what they could to keep him safe and they remained his friends.

“Grimaud,” Planchet’s voice said. “He faints. My master faints.”

This was a completely different matter. What D’Artagnan would be doing in Athos’s kitchen, and why he should be fainting, was totally beyond Athos’s comprehension. But Athos was almost old enough to be D’Artagnan’s father, and the young Gascon, with his quickness of mind, his cunning, his brilliance with a sword and his unswerving loyalty to his friends, was exactly the son that Athos would have liked to claim. There was between them a bond that was only half friendship. The other half was Athos’s almost desperate wish to protect the young man from the strokes he himself had suffered at the hands of fate.

The idea that D’Artagnan was wounded or ill carried him all the way into the kitchen and onto a scene of the purest mayhem. There was blood all over, on every possible surface. The kitchen table, at which Grimaud normally prepared food, and at which Grimaud ate-no matter how often Athos told him he could serve him there, also, if they were alone. Grimaud insisted on serving the man who would always be Monsieur le Comte to him either in the dining room or in Athos’s own room-had bloodstains, and a basin filled with blood-colored water. Bloodied rags littered the floor. There was blood on the servants, blood on Aramis’s incredibly elaborate doublet, cut according to the latest and most daring fashion, in blue velvet and flame-colored satin, and on Porthos’s cheek and the ends of his red hair.

In the midst of all this, D’Artagnan sat, stripped to the waist. There was blood all over him too, blood on the various ligatures wound around his arm. And, as Athos watched, the rest of them, not seeing him, had rallied around D’Artagnan with the obvious idea of preventing an imminent collapse. Aramis was supporting the young man, and Porthos was helping-one hampering the other, in the way the two of them were likely to, when they both acted out of the best intentions and without coordinating intents. And, standing by D’Artagnan, Grimaud-Grimaud, who sometimes could behave as though alcohol were the enemy of man, as the puritans in England believed-was pouring something amber colored into D’Artagnan’s half-open mouth.

“D’Artagnan,” Athos said, shocked. “What is here?”

The boy sat up straight at Athos’s voice, as he hadn’t at the swallow of what Athos guessed was brandy. He pushed the glass away, as though embarrassed by it or by his weakness, and he looked up at Athos, trying to force a smile onto a much-too-pale face. “It is nothing. A scratch. A wound hardly worth mentioning.”

“Wounded,” Athos said, and because this was something he understood, he turned without one more word, and took his stairs, two steps at a time, to his bedroom where, from the bottom of his clothes press, he extracted a jar that the Gascon himself had given to him months ago. Back to the kitchen, jar in hand, he stretched it to Grimaud. “The ointment that Monsieur D’Artagnan was so good as to give me when I was wounded, Grimaud. You remember its effect on me, and I’m sure it will have a like effect on him.”

Grimaud, used to his master’s ways, took the jar and uncorked it, while he directed Planchet, “You will have to undo that ligature, Planchet,” and, to D’Artagnan’s quickly suppressed moan, “There’s nothing for it, Monsieur D’Artagnan, and it was your fault as well as mine, for Monsieur le Comte is exactly right. If you’d reminded me you’d given us a pot of the ointment, we would have used it to start with.”

Athos, who had enough experience with wounds, not only from attempting to bind his own, but from binding Aramis’s and Porthos’s too, after duels when servants weren’t available, moved to help Planchet and soon had managed to remove the bandage without causing D’Artagnan to do more than bite his lower lip and grow twice as pale.

He examined the long, deep gash beneath. He would not put his finger in it to test the hypothesis, but he was almost absolutely sure that the sword had cut to the bone. “How did this happen?” he asked. “How did you get cut like this, D’Artagnan? Was it while you were pretending to be a servant? Did anyone take a sword to you while you were unarmed?”

Perhaps something of his anger at the idea showed in his eyes, because D’Artagnan looked alarmed. “No, Athos. No. It happened after that, at the royal palace.”

Athos raised his eyebrows as he slathered the wound with the ointment from Gascony, whose miraculous, but proven, claim it was that had any wound not reached a vital organ, the ointment would cure it in no time. In their trip to Gascony, Athos had found this ointment was universal, and perhaps explained the madcap character of the Gascons, who would rather fight than speak. Or for that matter, would rather talk than eat or make love. Knowing they could impunely escape wounds had made them willing to receive the worst wounds without dying, and they had lost all reason to restrain themselves.

“I went to the royal palace at… That is… There was a note…” He blushed. “From Constance.”

Athos felt his expression harden. Right then, all he could think about was that Constance Bonacieux, D’Artagnan’s lover, had somehow betrayed him. But he just stopped himself saying so, when Aramis looked up at him, and said, in a slow, sullen voice, as though he resented having to reveal even a little of his private life. “It was my fault,” he said. “I’m sure it was me they were trying to kill, or kidnap, or do who knows what to.”

Porthos grunted at this. “It could have been me,” he said. “I had, you know, just called a lot of attention to myself by setting the hammer swinging into the swords, and it is not unlikely someone realized what the truth was, despite D’Artagnan’s clever story about the ghost. And you know, if they knew, there were reasons they might have been angry at me.”

“Plebeians, you mean,” Aramis said, his words tolling with absolute disdain. “If you’re about to convince me that the six men in cloaks who attacked us were in fact from that neighborhood, I am not likely to believe it, my friend. No man who hasn’t had extreme learning in swordplay could possibly have fought like that. Nor was their attack, coordinated and seemingly planned, a mere revenge for what they would doubtless think of as a mere prank in the workshop.”

Athos, listening to all these disconnected words, found it hard to formulate a question of his own. From what he could gather, while he was at the Palais Cardinal, his friends had been running around town, each in his several ways, doing his best to call attention to himself and-incidentally-to cause as much trouble as humanly possible.

He started and discarded several lines of enquiry. He knew that asking Porthos about taking a hammer to swords would only cause a flow of words more likely to leave him bewildered than not. And he rather suspected that asking Aramis about why he believed this was his fault would only cause him to say some nonsense about some woman or other-or possibly worse-about some point of theology and divine retribution. And D’Artagnan, whose lips Grimaud was, again, solicitously wetting with brandy, did not seem able to assemble more than two words without succumbing to blood loss.