Little Gentlemen (Ch1)

[igenlode]

Here, then is the first fruit of my crackfic crossover: eventual length 9800 words, a little longer than estimated. (And weirdly enough I actually had an idea for something that turned out to use the BBC versions of the characters, even though I was under the impression at the time that it was the siege of La Rochelle -- if I'm going to write that one I probably need to do it quickly before it fades, because that really *will* be a one-shot, and ironically probably a good deal more saleable to the fandom at large...)

Meanwhile this one is going to need a summary of some sort, which I had forgotten all about :-(

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Little Gentlemen

A starving street musician is sent by a kindly benefactor to find refuge in a stately home now inhabited by a crowd of boys: a crackfic crossover in which Louisa May Alcott's "Little Men" meets the world of Dumas' "Twenty Years After", and Athos finds his true vocation in the upbringing of the young.

Chapter 1 — A New Arrival

In the last of the evening light an ox-cart came slowly along the road beyond La Vallière, the heavy beasts and their driver alike weary and powdered with dust. But the day’s work was almost over, and the oxen lifted their heads, nostrils flaring as if at the scent of water, as they approached the familiar homeward bend up ahead.

“Here, lad.” The driver lifted his long goad, not unkindly, to nudge the shoulder of the ragged boy perched astride the rear beam of the cart. A jerk of his chin indicated the pair of entrance posts they were passing, and beyond them a long white house in the distance, half-glimpsed in the growing dusk. “This is where you get off. Get along with you up to the chateau, and they’ll see to you there. You look as if you could do with a square meal to flesh out those bones of yours.”

“Please?” The boy’s great dark eyes were far too large for his face, and he had flinched, clearly not understanding a word.

The driver prodded him again, less gently. “Get off. You— up there. Understand?”

His passenger scrambled down, stiffly despite his haste, and nodded, clutching the pitifully small bundle that was clearly all he possessed.

“Go on, then. Get!” This last was addressed to the oxen, which had taken the opportunity to stop, and the beasts leaned into the harness once more and resumed their patient, plodding gait.

The cart creaked back into motion, the last of the day’s burdens shed, and after a moment the driver glanced back. “Good luck, lad.”

The boy by the side of the highway had not moved.

~o~

Presently, uncertain and shivering, he heard an owl call in the distant wood. It seemed to wake him from his stupor, and he drew forth a letter from within his shirt, turning it over and over as if the folded sheet —worn and somewhat soiled from much handling— were a talisman. Indeed it was clear that the superscription, written though it was in a firm, delicate hand, might as well have been a kabbalistic text so far as the bearer was concerned.

But already it was growing too dark to make out the markings on the page, whatever their import, and his ragged shirt did little to keep out the evening chill. The owl called again and was answered by another, and with a final look around him the boy thrust the paper back into his breast and set off with resolution through the entrance and along the drive towards the white walls of the chateau glimmering up above.

It was springtime, and there had been rain. The driveway was heavily rutted and had been churned by hooves, and soon he left the track and struck off directly across the rough ground, stumbling a little on unseen tussocks, for the knoll on which the house stood. Great dark trees loomed behind it, and at the foot of the knoll he found himself passing through a little grove where the boughs seemed drifted with late-fallen snow that starred the ground beneath them. It was not until a gust of wind sent a fresh flurry of petals about his ears that he understood they were laden with white flowers.

There were lights beginning to come out ahead like warm yellow stars through the dusk. He pressed on towards that welcoming promise, and came up against a barrier of iron railings through which there drifted the evening scent of herbs from a flourishing potager, and a muffled yelping of dogs from which he shrank. But there was an open courtyard beyond, where there would be kitchens, and warmth...

The drive lay away to his right, and there was a gate, its ornate ironwork a tracery of ornament against the deepening colour of the sky. He made his way hesitantly along the fence, one hand clinging tightly to the ties of the bundle that bumped against his shoulder. There was no food left, and very few of the coins that had been given to him —unforeseen fortune from heaven!— to see him on his way. But he had known only the streets of Paris, and before that the grey seas and long roads of an endless journey away from the hardships of a childhood home he could barely recall. He had never been inside a house like this one, with its long rows of windows and its terraced front. Surely all this must be some mistake... but there would be a corner perhaps somewhere in which they would let him spend the night, and if the cook was generous then there might be scraps from the table to take with him in the morning when he was sent away.

He had just reached the gate when a light rattle of hoofs sounded behind him in the dusk, and the next minute a boy of about his own age came cantering hastily along the drive and reined up short. For a moment they stared at one another.

The boy on the horse was long-limbed and slightly built, but he sat the animal with an accustomed ease, and however plain his clothes, a neat fringe of lace at his wrists and throat showed pale in the twilight. He swung down from the saddle and tugged on the bell-rope that hung by the gate. The sound rang out appallingly loudly, and the other boy shrank back, but the young cavalier did not seem to notice, advancing on him with hand outstretched.

“Hallo! Are you a new boy? I’m Raoul.”

Getting no answer, he came forward another pace and tried again. Across the courtyard a side-door opened, letting out a foreshortened spill of light, but there was nothing to be heard in his voice but welcome. “I’m Raoul. What’s your name?”

It was impossible not to respond to that confiding tone. “Venya. But speak... not many by French.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Raoul said cheerfully, laying a hand on the boy’s shoulder. He clearly took stock of the ragged, dirty shirt there, but did not take his hand away. “Franz couldn’t speak a word when he came. And neither could Jakob— monsieur d’Artagnan found him somewhere in the Dutch wars and sent him here, and now he’s the roundest, jolliest little fellow you ever saw. Who sent you? Was it Uncle Aramis?”

Venya, grasping desperately to catch one word in ten of this conversation as it flew past, shook his head, and fumbled again to draw out his precious letter. An old man with a lantern was coming across the courtyard.

“Abbé d’Herblay,” Venya managed, and held out the letter mutely, wriggling from under the other boy’s grasp.

But Raoul just laughed. “That’s him. Only we call him Uncle Aramis, mostly. I think he likes to forget about being an abbé when he’s here. We had the most tremendous bolster-fight once, and it took all of us together to get the better of him... And sometimes he sends boys to monsieur le comte, and they’re always the most interesting ones.”

He hesitated. “He sent me. I don’t remember it, because I was only little... but I don’t have a mother or a father, you see. So Uncle Aramis sent me to grow up here and learn from monsieur le comte— this is his house, you know, the Comte de La Fère. Do you have a family? Oh, I’m sorry—”

That one word, at least, had struck home with painful clarity, and Raoul perceived it at once, seeking to make amends.

“It’s all right— lots of the other boys don’t. But they’ll look after you here, you’ll see.” He swung round at the sound of the gate opening behind him. The old man had reached them in answer to the bell’s summons and was regarding the two boys with a disapproving air, holding the lantern high to peer through the dusk. Raoul’s horse snorted and stepped back, pulling on the rein, and Raoul reached up to gentle it, patting the chestnut neck. He began to lead the animal through in the direction of the stables, and looked back at the old man in apology.

“I didn’t mean to be late, Charlot, I promise. Only Madame de Saint-Remy called me back at the last minute with a message for monsieur le comte, and little Louise wanted to say goodbye... This is Venya. Can you see that he’s taken care of? I’ll be in as soon as I’ve stabled Reynard—”

This last was called back over his shoulder as he was already halfway across the courtyard, and old Charlot raised his voice in reply. “You mind you rub Reynard down properly, monsieur Raoul!”

“Yes, Charlot,” Raoul said obediently, vanishing with his chestnut around the corner into the growing dusk, and Charlot turned to survey the ragged newcomer with a sigh.

“Venya, is it? Now what kind of a fool foreign name— Well, no mind.” His eye fell on the letter that the boy, bewildered, was still holding out, and he stooped to inspect the superscription. “To Monsieur le Comte de La Fère at his chateau of Bragelonne, near Blois... and that’s the Abbé d’Herblay’s hand right enough, just like the last, though where we’re to put all these waifs and strays it amuses him to send I’m sure I don’t know. Well, we’ll fit you in, I dare say.”

He held out a hand. “Eh, no need to look so scared... Here, come.”

And this last, at least, Venya understood, and obeyed in answer to the familiar accents of authority.

It was in the wake of Charlot, therefore, that he entered into what seemed to him a vast kitchen awash with undreamt-of warmth and heavenly odours, and was conducted into the presence of an awe-inspiring personage whom the old man addressed by the name of monsieur Grimaud. The latter observed the new arrival without a hint of surprise, and delivered himself of precisely three words, made eloquent by gesture: “Food — bath — bed.” After which he took possession of the letter of introduction which the Abbé d’Herblay had given to Venya, and bore it away with as much ceremony as if it had been presented on a silver platter.

Under any other circumstances Venya might have objected to the indignity of being bathed from top to toe at his age, and at the hands not of Charlot but of his comfortable round-faced wife. But with his belly full for the first time in days —it was only the good plain pottage that had been simmering in front of the fire, but to the half-starved boy it might as well have been turbot or roast swan— he could put up with almost anything. He submitted to being scrubbed in unmentionable places, and sat drowsily in the tub with warm water being poured about his ears while the busy fingers of Charlot’s wife worked on the tangles in his hair. Presently, as his head nodded forward and almost touched his knees, he was put into a freshly-laundered shirt that was far too large for him —it was, though he did not know it, one of the Comte’s own— and carried off without a word by monsieur Grimaud himself, who had returned for that purpose.

Of the rest of the house he retained only the vaguest of impressions: dark panelling and a succession of stairs and corridors that seemed without end. He was borne in Grimaud’s arms across the threshold of a room almost entirely occupied by a pair of tall curtained beds, and inserted between the covers with all the meticulous impersonal efficiency with which the King’s valet might have inserted his young majesty Louis XIV into the royal smallclothes.

Compared to the heap of rags on which he and his father had been accustomed to huddle together for warmth, it was paradise. Venya turned his head into the pillow and was asleep almost before Grimaud, at the window, had closed the shutters and come back soft-footed across the room to draw shut the hangings about the bed.

~o~

And the Comte de La Fère, having received from Raoul’s own lips the message of Madame de Saint-Remy —a small matter of a copse to be felled, and the customary compliments between neighbours— dismissed the boy from his presence with an affectionate look, and leaned back in his chair to break the seal on Aramis’s letter. A rueful smile touched the corner of his mouth as he read, but it dwelt mostly in his fine dark eyes, which now in his forty-seventh year had acquired lines of humour they had not possessed in his melancholy youth.

“My dear Comte,

“Since you persist in your determination to educate the most unpromising of material into, as you put it, the perfect gentlemen of which our age stands in such pressing need —and on that last, I am inclined to agree— I am sending you a case after your own heart. So far as I can judge he is about twelve years old, much the same as young Raoul, and cannot read or write a word of French, although he understands somewhat more than you might think. His father was a street musician from somewhere out of the East, and he and the boy had been living together with certain compatriots in a cellar in Paris. But the father was set upon by thieves for what little he possessed, and taken to La Charité, where he died, leaving his son destitute and bringing the boy to my attention.

“This Venya has some musical talent, I believe, and at any rate a good heart and a quick mind, when he is not frightened out of his wits. Any further accomplishments, as ever, my friend, I leave up to you.

“How are the Porthoslets? My compliments to the proud father, our good du Vallon, and his worthy wife. I understand his munificence towards your orphans is overwhelming, and hence I have no scruple in foisting the upkeep of yet another upon you; he likes this generosity to be well-known amongst his neighbours, so the favour is mutual, after all.

“I have a good many fair penitents in hand at present and so am unable to accept your kind invitation to renew my visits to Bragelonne. I am flattered, truly, to know that my presence is so fondly remembered by the inhabitants of your menagerie. It was a pleasure to shed the soutane for a while in their company— although I could wish for a little more respect to be shown for my person on the next occasion, for it is a while since I have been quite so mercilessly pummelled from all directions.... We are none of us getting any younger, and while I admire your grey hairs I have no desire to appear before La Lionne and all the precieuses of Paris in that guise any sooner than I must. After all, I have now passed thirty-five years of age.”

At this last ingenuous statement, the reader —to all appearances entirely untroubled by the traces of silver that dignified his dark locks— could not forbear to laugh, with the fondness of long acquaintance. For they had known each other first when d’Herblay was a seminary student of twenty, and already perhaps pardonably vain, and as there were not so very many years between them his friend had undoubtedly exceeded by some distance the milestone to which he referred.

The last few lines at the foot of the sheet were a trifle cramped. The Comte bent his gaze anew to the task of deciphering them.

“À propos, the Duchesse de Longueville has passed on to me some highly entertaining Court gossip with which I would regale you if I thought you would appreciate it. But knowing better, alas, I remain ever yours—

“D’HERBLAY.”

This last sally drew a further smile from its recipient. He read through the letter again and then laid it gently down, smoothing out the folds in an unconsciously graceful gesture. His thoughts had travelled, by a natural process, from the sender of the missive to the boy who had brought it, and what might be done for him. It was easy enough to guess at the depths of cold and poverty that lay behind the light words so carefully chosen; at least, he reflected a little ruefully, there were no ugly habits of arrogance to be trained out in cases such as this.

Gaston d’Orléans held his discontented court at Blois, but over the years the Comte de La Fère had acquired his own circle of nobles’ sons at Bragelonne, along with the assorted waifs and strays foisted upon him by his friends. There was a satisfaction to be had, in a world where it seemed ideals had elsewhere long fled, in forming a boy’s character: in taking a clumsy, ill-disciplined youth, and tutoring him in all the courtesies and accomplishments he lacked. D’Artagnan, on whom he had once bestowed all the protective affection he might have felt for a son of his own blood, had long since grown beyond any need for such guardianship, but there were others who had not. And there were those, like the young Switzer Franz and curly-headed little Jakob —like Raoul even, who was, though one could not say it, dearest of all to his heart— who were of no birth at all, and to whom it would fall, in time, to make their own way through the world with whatever talents in them he could find. Now, with Venya’s coming, there was another to add to that number.

The boy was musical. The Comte considered for a moment. Something might be made of that. But for now, at least, the newest member of the menagerie, as Aramis could not be dissuaded from calling it, would stand in greater need of other things.

Comments

[watervole]

I enjoyed reading this.
Lucky Venya!

[igenlode]

Thanks you so much!
Of course it fell completely flat on AO3 (3 page views, which is what I knew would happen when writing a crossover between two obscure sub-fandoms, but somehow one always hopes...) which obviously makes it very hard to tell whether the story is actually any good or not, so to know that someone at least enjoyed it --and my OC-- is genuinely worth a lot.