in his friend Porthos’s look. “Well, everyone knows how fast Mousqueton’s fingers can be, Porthos.”
“But he wouldn’t steal a sword,” Porthos said. “To what purpose? And if he ran the armorer through, why would he be unconscious? I mean Mousqueton. Surely he wouldn’t faint at the sight of blood! He is my servant. You did tell them that, D’Artagnan, did you not?”
D’Artagnan shrugged. He looked up and his gaze met Athos’s. D’Artagnan looked more troubled and worried than his calm words would lead anyone to suppose. “Porthos, they say that a hammer fell from its peg nearby—probably in the fight—and chanced to hit Mousqueton on the head, just as he killed the armorer.”
“God’s Teeth!” Porthos said. “Are you telling me you believe Mousqueton killed him?”
“Mousqueton is your servant, Porthos, as you said, he cannot be a stranger to blood and killing.”
“Yes, but . . . it is one thing to kill someone in a duel,” Porthos said. “And another and quite different to murder someone by stealth.”
“But we don’t know if it wasn’t a duel, Porthos,” D’Artagnan said. “Or a fight.”
Porthos shook his head. “What would he have to fight with the armorer about? Good man, he was, let me have repairs on my sword on credit. He knew Mousqueton . . .” Words failing him, Porthos simply opened his hands.
Athos could have said many things, among them being, that the way life was, it was quite possible that a sudden altercation had arisen, or sudden anger. Or he could have said that Mousqueton was, after all, a little inclined to ignore the eighth commandment. But the whole situation—Mousqueton being unconscious when found, and clearly unable to give a coherent account of himself, even by the time his master had arrived on the scene—seemed skewed. Surely, it couldn’t be. The circumstances were just too strange. And the guards had been all too quick to seize upon Mousqueton as a culprit.
Perhaps they had accused Mousqueton out of pique against the musketeers. Or perhaps, just perhaps, because they were hoping to hide the true culprit, if they moved fast enough.
Athos took his hand to his forehead. “I do think, D’Artagnan, that this is all a little too convenient. And, though Mousqueton is doubtless human, and could doubtless have lost his temper, I must say that his being found unconscious does not seem natural.”
“No,” D’Artagnan said. “Fear not. I agree with you. The whole thing is too convenient by far, for Mousqueton to be found unconscious with a bloodied sword in his hand. I don’t for a moment believe it all happened like that, with no one else being involved.”
“But what can we do to prove it?” Aramis asked.
D’Artagnan shrugged. “What we always do. We’ll find out what happened. We ask people who might know something. We examine the armorer’s shop.”
“And we prove Mousqueton innocent!” Porthos said.
“And we prove him innocent,” D’Artagnan said. “Others among us have been accused of murder before,” he looked at Aramis. “Surely the fact that Mousqueton is a servant doesn’t make him any less our responsibility.”
“No,” Aramis said, doubtless remembering the circumstances under which he’d been suspected of murder, circumstances far more incriminating than even Mousqueton’s.1 “No. Perhaps more our responsibility, since he’s more defenseless than we are.”
“Yes,” Porthos said. “We are his only family, you know? He was an orphan when I took him into my service.”
“Well, then,” Athos said, and though he heard the amusement in his own voice, he knew he was in dead earnest. “Let it be for our servants as it is for us. We’ll prove him innocent or die trying. One for all—”
“And all for one,” his friends answered in a single voice.
The Antechamber of Monsieur de Treville; The Inadvisability of Tempting a Musketeer; The Limits of the Possible
PORTHOS didn’t doubt that Monsieur de Treville would be able to do something about Mousqueton. After all, Monsieur de Treville, captain of the musketeers, often stood somewhere between a father and a confessor to his musketeers. He was the one who got them pardons from the King when they were arrested mid duel. He was the one who protected them from trouble when their amorous adventures landed them in hot water.
And he had been the one who, those many years ago when Aramis killed a man in a duel with Porthos as his second, had looked after them and given them a place to hide and identities to hide under. He had also, through the various travails in which the four friends found themselves