some fakery, by putting your fingers or hand into his wounds? Else, how would you know it wasn’t just something painted on, and the look on the man’s face a mere casual resemblance? And if you were going to go out preaching this as truth to the whole world, how could you not need to know for sure?
He shook his head in dismissal of Aramis’s odd notions, notwithstanding that Aramis was a good man and a better friend. Porthos must remember this, and perhaps he should try to argue with him less. Aramis could not avoid the blindness his excellent education had created in him.
Meanwhile Porthos, who was far from blind, discerned in the corner an instrument somewhat like a shepherd’s crook, which was used to bring swords down and put them up onto the ceiling racks. He loped over to get it, and returned to select a hammer to hang up.
Here he was faced with an immediate problem because while swords had means of hanging from the hooks on the suspended racks, hammers did not. There was no handle, no loop of leather, no way he could hook that hammer on the shepherd’s crook, and get it hanging from the rack. Which left . . . balancing the hammer on the shepherd’s crook and hanging it up there.
Porthos looked at the hammer, the handle of which was big enough to fit his own hand, but for which most men would need two hands, and the head of the hammer, which was almost as big as Porthos’s own head. “Right,” he said, and wandered off in search of some sort of material to make a loop. He found it in the form of a pile of leather strips in the corner, that, by the look of them, were used as some sort of polishing implement.
He tied a couple of the longer strips to the hammer handle, then using the crook, gently inserted the loop into one of the hooks on the rack, then looked up at the hammer hanging amid the swords. So far so good. If there had been a hammer hanging on the rack, that would be what it had looked like. Now, if that hammer fell, and hit someone on the head . . .
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,