involved, stood by their side and protected them. Porthos was sure that Monsieur de Treville could do something.
But when they arrived, the antechamber was crowded. Oh, it was normally crowded, serving the musketeers as gathering place, sports chamber and training room. The entire room—a huge, well-proportioned room of Italianate influence, furnished with fine mosaic floors and columned expanse—was the setting for impromptu mock duels—battles for position and place—in which the musketeers tested their mettle and fought with such abandon that a stranger might imagine they wished to kill each other. On the stairs, the more adventurous ones fought, gaining and losing a step or two, at the risk of eye or ear or limb.
Normally when in the antechamber, Porthos, Athos, Aramis and D’Artagnan whiled away their time fighting on the stairs—either against each other, or the four of them shoulder to shoulder against any challengers. But this time they were in a hurry and, as they came into the room, Aramis searched among the throng of musketeers for a harassed looking young man in the livery of Monsieur de Treville—one of his attendants or clerks, who made it his business to announce when someone might have an urgent need. He cut through the crowd to approach the small dark-haired gentleman and whisper in his ear.
As the gentleman turned to go through the dueling crowd on the stairs and Aramis turned back to his friends, Porthos heard behind him, “I’d say they’re worried. I hear Porthos’s servant was arrested for murder.”
“He let his own servant be taken?” another voice said.
“Worse. He let his servant be taken by Richelieu’s guards,” another said.
And yet another quipped in, in the tone of someone who would ape Aramis’s style of dressing and manner, without the slightest hint of the blond musketeer’s suave personality, “Well, murder surprises me, but we all know he’s a cursed little thief, don’t we.”
As Porthos felt his hand drop to the hilt of his sword, another voice said, “Oh, no. I wouldn’t say that.” Porthos halted his movement, but when the voice finished, “I’d never call Mousqueton little,” Porthos’s hand pulled up and his sword with it, glinting by the light coming in through the lead-paned windows of the antechamber.
“You dare,” he heard himself bellow, before he was even sure what he was about. “You insult me and my servant? In my hearing?”
Turning, he faced a group of five musketeers—it was plain they’d been the ones speaking. For one, even though the antechamber was so crowded that it would have been difficult for any individual person to move, everyone around them had managed to move back. They, themselves, looked as though they’d been stopped in the middle of taking a step back—but had done it too slowly to quite manage to meld with the crowd behind them, which managed to look as though they had always been back there, looking with interested eyes at the five and the irate giant redhead with his sword in hand.
Porthos’s eye alighted on each of the suddenly pale faces. Yes. As he expected. Three of them he didn’t know by name, though they’d probably been on the same side in a hundred street battles, when the cry of “to me, Musketeers” went up and any musketeer in range came to support his comrades.
The other two he knew all too well. One of them, Roux, who shared with Athos the superficial resemblance of being tall and dark haired—though his eyes were not dark blue and he did not have the same air of nobility—had for some time now taken to wearing the same old-fashioned, Spanish style tight doublets and flaring breeches that Athos favored. The other, Bernard D’Augine, was his best friend. Blond and slim like Aramis, he aped the blond musketeer in everything, from his fashionable clothes, to his habits of speech, and that annoying habit that Aramis had of turning his hand to contemplate his fingernails when he was about to say something particularly cutting.
In his defense—at least that Porthos knew—D’Augine had not taken to claiming that his passage through the musketeer corps was just a temporary detour on his way to becoming a priest. This, and this alone saved Porthos from wanting to cut his heart out right there. But he was not feeling particularly charitable for all that. “Draw,” he said, through clenched teeth. “All five of you draw. Let’s see if you’re match for my steel. Let’s see if, in my place, you would have been able to keep your servant