The Barefoot Queen (79 page)

“Do you need my help with your order?” The constable from Barquillo interrupted his thoughts.

They both got up and wiped the dirt off their stockings. Blas didn’t
need help. He didn’t even want the other constable to know where he was headed.

“I appreciate it, José, but it’s not necessary. How are things going?” he asked only so he wouldn’t seem rude.

The other man sighed and shrugged. “You can imagine—” he began to say.

“The procession is getting away from you,” interrupted Blas. “I don’t mean to keep you.”

José shifted his gaze to the backs heading down Hortaleza Street. He sighed. “She was a pious woman, the accountant’s wife.”

“I’m sure she was.”

“Everyone’s time has to come.”

Blas didn’t want to get into that discussion and he kept quiet.

“Well,” added José after clicking his tongue, “I’ll see you soon.”

“Whenever you’d like,” agreed the other as José prepared to follow the viaticum.

Blas waited a moment and then set off again, passing in front of the Saint Mary Magdalene Home for Reformed Prostitutes: the viaticum had left from its church and the mortal sin patrol would also emerge from there. He slowed down and even tapped his truncheon against the ground, slightly worried. The death that comes to everyone—sin, the devil that the priests were trying to expel—made him doubt what he was going to do. He could change his mind. He smiled at the idea of having regrets right in front of the place where fifty loose-living women, who’d been touched by the hand of God, had voluntarily decided to be confined under the auspices of Mary Magdalene, living a cloistered life of prayer and self-discipline and never again leaving the home unless it was to embrace religion or marry one of those honest men whom the Brothers of Hope procured for them.

The repentant women had to pay one hundred
reales de vellón
and four pounds of wax to enter the Mary Magdalene Home and be locked up for life! One had to pay to repent. He didn’t even have that much money. So he couldn’t repent, he concluded, finding a certain satisfaction in the argument: the poor couldn’t do it. Besides, he didn’t want to renounce the money he was hoping to make that day.

He continued on, turned to the right at Panaderos Street and headed toward Regueros Street.

“Hail Mary,” he called as he opened the door to a small single-story house, whitewashed on the outside, neat and clean on the inside, with a vegetable patch out the back, crammed among nine similar dwellings.

“Full of Grace …” was heard from inside. “Ah! It’s you.” A pretty young gypsy woman came out of an inner room. A girl’s head peeked out from behind her.

“Pedro?” was all the constable asked.

The young woman had gone back into the room but not the girl, who remained still, with her large eyes fixed on Blas.

“At the tavern,” shouted the gypsy women from the room she was rummaging around in, “where else?”

The constable winked at the little girl, whose expression didn’t change at all.

“Thank you,” he answered with a disappointed look.

The girl no longer smiled the way she used to, when she lived with her mother, on Amor de Dios Street. Blas tried again with the same results. He frowned, shook his head and left.

Regueros Street was a single block that was just a few paces from the tavern on the corner of San José and Reyes Alta, beside a patch of open ground bordering Madrid’s wall; there rose the monastery of Santa Bárbara with its discalced Mercedarians and the Carmelite convent of Santa Teresa. Beside them, Queen Barbara of Portugal, wife of Ferdinand VI, often ill and a book lover, had ordered a new convent built, devoted to teaching noble girls under the auspices of Saint Francis de Sales, in 1748. It was said that the Queen had planned the part of the building that overlooked the gardens as a private residence to escape her husband’s stepmother, Elisabeth Farnese, and as a place to retire to if the King died before her, since they had no issue and the crown would pass to Charles, Elisabeth’s son, then King of Naples. In 1750 construction began; it was to be the largest and most sumptuous convent ever built in Madrid: alongside the new church devoted to Saint Barbara was erected a colossal palace with French and Italian influences using the finest materials. The compound would be surrounded by gardens and vegetable plots that would extend alongside the wall, from the Recoletos Meadow and Gate, almost all the way to the Santa Bárbara Gate.

That spring of 1754, Blas observed the construction, which was already quite far advanced. The Queen was sparing no expense. It was rumored
to have cost more than eighty million reals in total, although there were also those who lamented (Blas among them) that it was spent on the Queen’s glory and tranquillity instead of on a great cathedral. There were nearly 140 churches that celebrated mass daily, thirty-eight monasteries and almost as many convents, plus hospitals and schools packed into the walls that surrounded Madrid … Yet despite all that religious magnificence, the largest and most important city in the kingdom had no cathedral.

Blas cleared his way into the tavern with blows of his truncheon until he found Pedro, sitting at a table and drinking wine with various
chisperos
who were working as blacksmiths on that vast construction.

The gypsy, always vigilant, noticed the constable’s presence as people moved to avoid his truncheon. Something important must be happening for Blas to show up there, so far from his district. They both stepped away from the crowd as soon as they were able to.

“She’s been released,” whispered the constable.

Pedro maintained his gaze on his companion’s face; his lips were pursed, his teeth were grinding.

“Is she still under contract at the Príncipe?” he asked after a few moments.

“No.”

“That’s just going to cause me problems,” he commented to himself. “She needs to be finished off.”

Blas had been sure that would be the gypsy’s reaction. Almost two years by his side were more than enough for him to know his character. Violent rows, revenge to the point of murder. He had even sold his own wife!

“Are you sure …?” He hesitated.

“If they let her go it’s to avoid a scandal that could taint some grandees. Do you think that anyone will care what happens to a drunken whore?”

EVERYTHING HAD
happened the way Pedro had imagined: they dragged Milagros off the stage at the Príncipe after the theater magistrate ordered her arrest. The constables brought her straight to the royal jail, where she slept it off. The next morning, excited, nervous, restless from the lack of alcohol but sober, Milagros entered the court of law.

“Your highness should ask the Baron of San Glorio,” she challenged the magistrate who was presiding over her trial for scandalous behavior and a long string of other crimes, after the process had begun by asking her name.

“Why should I do that?” The magistrate immediately regretted that spontaneous question, but he’d been confused by the gypsy woman’s cheekiness.

“Because he raped me,” she answered. “He must know my name. He paid a lot of money for it. Ask him.”

“Don’t be impertinent! We have nothing to ask the baron.”

“Then ask the Count of Medin—”

“Silence!”

“Or the Count of Nava—”

“Sentry! Make her shut up!”

“They all forced themselves on me!” Milagros managed to shriek before the sentry and his truncheon reached her.

The man covered her mouth. Milagros bit his hand, hard.

“Do you want me to tell you how many more of your aristocrats have raped me?” she spat when the sentry pulled his hand away in pain.

The gypsy woman’s last question floated over the courtroom. All three magistrates looked at her. The prosecutor, the notary and the lawyer for the poor waited for their response.

“No,” replied the president. “We don’t want you to tell us. Session adjourned!” he then decided. “Take her to the dungeons.”

Milagros spent several days in the royal jail, enough for the court magistrates to consult with the councillors to the King and eminent noblemen. Although not all were in agreement, most rejected the idea that such illustrious surnames were mixed up in such a disagreeable matter. Finally, someone maintained that the matter tainted the King himself, because one of his councillors was a relative of a nobleman who’d been implicated, so they ordered the matter buried and Milagros was set free.

Despite the magistrates demanding discretion and the notary destroying the records of the trial proceedings and all references to her arrest, the matter got out and reached many ears, including those of Constable Blas.

“
THIS VERY
night,” ordered Pedro as they walked back to the house on Regueros Street. “We will do it this very night.”

We will do it?
That statement surprised the constable. He was about to object, but kept silent. He remembered the gypsy’s promise the day he had arrived in Madrid: women. He had enjoyed some in the nocturnal adventures he’d shared with Pedro; however, he was less interested in those idle pursuits than in the money he got out of the arrangement. Despite that … would he take part in a murder? Was the gypsy right about no one caring?

With those thoughts running through his head, he went into the house that Pedro shared with his new companion.

“Honoria!” he shouted in greeting. “We’re here for lunch!”

They ate stew and, for dessert, chestnut compote and quince jelly that the gypsy woman had made. Blas watched how Honoria tried to control little María’s sweet tooth. She failed; her nervousness grew as the girl disobeyed. As hard as she tried, thought the constable, watching María push away the young gypsy woman’s hands with her own, she couldn’t replace her mother. Although officially she was her mother! Pedro had got false papers that listed Honoria as the girl’s mother. He had shown them to the constable: “Pedro García and Honoria Castro. Married with one daughter.”

“Are you insane?” Blas had asked him when he saw them.

The gypsy waved off his question.

“And what if someone finds out? People know Honoria; they know she isn’t married to you. Anyone could …”

“Denounce me?”

“Yes.”

“They wouldn’t dare.”

“Even so …”

“Blas. We are gypsies. A
payo
will never understand. Life is a moment: this one.”

That was the end of the conversation, although Blas tried to work out why the gypsy behaved as he did. He was unable to, just as Pedro had said, but he did manage to understand why the gypsy people always had a sparkle in their eyes: they bet it all on every hand.

After lunch, Pedro satisfied the constable’s expectations of his generosity and promised him more after the “job” was done.

“Remember,” he said in parting, “tonight, after the chiming of the bells.”

THEY FOUND
Milagros prostrate and dejected in a corner of her room, with her gaze fixed on a single point on the ceiling and an empty bottle of liquor by her side.

“Aunt,” announced Pedro to Bartola, “we’re going back to Triana; gather your things and wait for me downstairs.”

Bartola García motioned toward Milagros with her chin. “What about her?”

Pedro let out a guffaw. “Don’t worry, no one will miss her.”

His laughter broke the long silence that had stretched out between the two women all day, since Milagros had compulsively polished off the liquor.

Milagros reacted and looked at them with bloodshot eyes. She stammered something. No one understood what she was saying.

“Shut up, you drunken whore!” spat Pedro.

She waved a hand clumsily through the air and tried to get up. Pedro ignored her; he waited impatiently for Bartola to gather her things and leave.

“Come on, come on, come on,” he urged.

The constable, at a distance, standing almost in the doorway, watched how Milagros tried to use the walls to help her stand up, but, weak, fell again. He shook his head as he watched her try once more. She leaned precariously on the wall, struggling to stay on her feet, as Blas tried to remember if he had ever witnessed a young woman’s murder. He searched through his memories of the city, where a motley horde of nobles, rich men, beggars and criminals—arrogant people quick to fight—mingled. As a constable he was familiar with all sorts of crimes and wickedness, but he had never witnessed the murder in cold blood of a beautiful young woman. His stomach shrank when he moved aside to let Bartola out, with a straw mattress beneath her arm and bundles of clothes and goods in her hands. The old woman didn’t say a word; she didn’t even look back. The few seconds it took her to drag her feet out of the room multiplied in the constable’s senses. Then he turned and blanched as Pedro reacted immediately, going over to Milagros and lifting her up mercilessly by the hair.

“Look at her!” he said, holding her upright. “The biggest whore in Madrid!”

Blas couldn’t take his eyes off the woman: beaten, helpless, lovely in spite of her filth and raggedness. If Pedro let go of her hair she would be unable to stand.
Is it really necessary to finish her off?
he wondered.

“I promised you women,” he was surprised to hear the gypsy say then, reminding him of their first conversation. “Here’s one: the great Barefoot Girl!”