The Armorer's Apprentice

Before Planchet ever folded a letter into the lining of his coat or memorized the layout of a Bastille corridor he'd only glimpse once, he spent three years learning to fit a breastplate to a man's chest so that a sword point would slide off it rather than through it. He was fourteen when his uncle took him on, a broad, patient man named Vasseur who kept a forge two streets back from the Place Royale and who had, in thirty years of work, never once raised his voice at an apprentice, which Planchet came to understand was itself a kind of eccentricity in the trade.

"A blade wants to go where it's pointed," Vasseur told him, the first week, holding up a half-finished cuirass so the boy could see the hammer marks still visible beneath the polish. "Your job isn't to stop it wanting that. Your job is to give it somewhere easier to go."

Planchet turned this over for a long time before he understood it wasn't only about armor.

The workshop took in commissions from men who could afford good steel and from men who could only afford the appearance of it, and Vasseur treated both kinds of customer with the same unhurried attention, which struck Planchet as either very wise or very bad for business, and it took him the better part of a year to decide it was both. A cardinal's guardsman came in once wanting his breastplate re-blued to hide a dent that would have told anyone who looked closely exactly which brawl he'd lost and to whom. Vasseur did the work without comment and charged him double what he'd have charged for an honest repair, which the guardsman paid without argument, understanding, as Planchet was beginning to understand, that some kinds of service were priced not by the hour but by the silence that came attached to them.

"You could have told him the dent still shows if you look at it in good light," Planchet said, once the guardsman had gone.

"I could have," Vasseur agreed. "But he already knows that. He's not paying me to fix his armor. He's paying me to agree with him that it's fixed."

This, too, Planchet filed away, though he wouldn't find a use for it until years later, standing behind a chair in a rented room on the Rue des Fossoyeurs, listening to a young Gascon explain with total conviction why a plan that was obviously going to get someone killed was in fact perfectly sound.

The trouble, when it came, arrived in the ordinary way trouble arrived for people without money: slowly, and then all at once. Vasseur's eyes had been failing for two years by the time Planchet turned seventeen, a fact the old man managed with the same unhurried patience he brought to everything else, working by feel where his sight failed him, trusting Planchet's younger eyes for the fine measurements without ever quite admitting that was what he was doing. It might have gone on that way for years, the two of them managing the slow decline together, if a customer hadn't come in one autumn afternoon wanting a rush job on a set of vambraces and left, three days later, with a complaint to the guild that the fitting was crooked.

It wasn't crooked. Planchet had done the fitting himself, at Vasseur's direction, and he'd done it correctly, and he could have proven as much if anyone on the guild board had been interested in proof rather than in the fact that Vasseur was sixty-one years old and half blind and had a customer willing to say so in front of witnesses. The guild didn't revoke Vasseur's license, there was no formal mechanism for that, and no one wanted the trouble of inventing one, but they made it clear, in the unhurried way institutions make things clear when they'd rather not put anything in writing, that new commissions would be going elsewhere from now on, to workshops with younger hands behind the older names.

Vasseur took the news the way he took most things, which was to say he took it, and then he sat with it for a while, and then he called Planchet in from the yard and told him, in almost exactly the tone he'd have used to discuss the price of iron, that there wasn't enough work left in the shop for two men, and that Planchet, being young and quick and better with his eyes than his master now was, ought to go find a position somewhere that could actually use what Vasseur had spent three years teaching him.

"I'm not leaving you to manage alone," Planchet said.

"You're not leaving me to manage anything," Vasseur said. "I've been managing for thirty years. I'll go on managing for however many I've got left. What you'd be doing, if you stayed, is watching me manage slower and slower until there's nothing left to manage at all, and calling that loyalty. I'd rather you called it something else. I'd rather you called it a waste, and went and found different work before it became one."

Planchet didn't leave immediately. It took another six months, and a winter thin enough that they were both glad of whatever small commissions still trickled in, but he left eventually, the way a man leaves a house that's slowly being sold out from under him one room at a time, hoping each departure will be the last and knowing, somewhere underneath the hoping, that it won't be. Vasseur died the year after, of nothing dramatic, just age and cold and a chest that had been giving him trouble since before Planchet was apprenticed to him. Planchet heard about it from a cousin, three weeks after the funeral, too late to have done anything but arrive and stand in the shop and note, with the particular ache of a trade he no longer practiced, that someone had already sold off the good anvil.

What Planchet did with an armorer's training, in a city that no longer had steady work for armorers, was become the kind of servant who could fix nearly anything, which turned out to be a more transferable skill than he'd expected. He'd learned to read the true state of a piece of equipment past whatever its owner wanted to believe about it, a habit Vasseur had drilled into him without ever naming it as a habit, just as a way of looking at things — and he found, once he was hired into the Bonacieux household and later attached, more or less permanently, to a penniless young Gascon with more courage than sense, that the same habit applied just as well to people.

He could tell, usually within the first quarter hour, which of his master's plans were sound and which were merely confident, in exactly the way he'd once been able to tell which breastplate would turn a blade and which would only look, in good light, like it might. He rarely said so directly. That hadn't been Vasseur's way either, and Planchet had absorbed more of the old man's manner than he'd realized until he found himself using it, but he made himself useful in the particular fashion of a man who has spent years learning that the actual job is very rarely the job anyone is paying for. He was paid, nominally, to look after a Gascon's boots and errands. What he actually did, most days, was give a great many overconfident plans somewhere easier to go than straight through the middle of whoever was pointing them.

Years on, standing in a doorway during one of d'Artagnan's more elaborate schemes for retrieving something he had no business retrieving, Planchet found himself thinking of the guardsman and his dented breastplate, the client who hadn't wanted honesty, only the appearance of a problem solved, and reflected that he had, in fact, never stopped practicing his trade at all. He'd only stopped charging for it separately from his wages, and started fitting the armor to the man instead of the man to the armor, which Vasseur, he suspected, would have recognized immediately as the same work wearing a different coat.

He never did become an armorer in any sense the guild would have recognized. But he kept, for the rest of his life, a habit of running his thumb along any piece of metalwork that crossed his path (a hinge, a lock, a sword hilt) checking by feel for the places where the work was sound and the places where it had only been made to look that way, exactly as his uncle had taught him, in a shop two streets back from the Place Royale, in the years before either of them had any notion that Planchet's real career would be spent protecting a man far more reckless, and far more dear to him, than any breastplate he'd ever fitted.