The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet (11 page)

“Is there a place where we could keep watch on the tavern?”

I tried to remember. It was a short, gloomy street which at various points—by a crumbling wall, say, or around some hidden corner—would be pitch-black at night. The only problem, I explained, was that such places might be occupied by trulls.

“Trulls?”

“Whores.”

I felt a kind of cruel pleasure in using such words, as if this gave me back a little of the initiative which she seemed determined to seize. Angélica de Alquézar did not, after all, know everything. Besides, she may have been dressed as a man, and be very brave indeed, but in Madrid, and at night, I was in my element and she was not. The sword hanging from
my
belt was not an ornament.

“Oh,” she said.

This restored my composure. I might be head over heels in love, but this in no way diminished me, and, I concluded, it was no bad thing to make this clear.

“Tell me what exactly you’re up to and where I fit in.”

“Later,” she said and set off with determined step.

I stayed where I was. After going only a short distance, she stopped and turned.

“Tell me,” I insisted, “or you’re on your own.”

“You wouldn’t do that.”

She was standing there defiantly, a black shape in male costume, one hand resting casually on the belt on which she wore her dagger. I counted to ten, then spun round and strode away. Six, seven, eight steps. I was cursing inside and my heart was breaking. She was letting me leave, and I could not go back.

“Wait,” she said.

I stopped, much relieved. I heard her footsteps approaching, felt her hand on my arm. When I turned, her eyes were lit by a ray of moonlight slipping between the eaves. I thought I could smell fresh bread. It was her. Yes, she smelled of fresh bread.

“I need an escort,” she said.

“But why me?”

“Because there’s no one else I can trust.”

It sounded like the truth. It sounded like a lie. It sounded probable and improbable, possible and impossible, and the fact is, I didn’t care. She was close. Very close. If I had reached out a hand, I could have touched her body, her face.

“There’s a man I have to watch,” she said.

I stared at her in astonishment. What was a maid of honor from the court doing out alone in the dangerous Madrid night, keeping watch on a man? On whose orders? The sinister figure of her uncle, the royal secretary, came into my mind. I was, I realized, getting drawn in again. Angélica was the niece of one of Captain Alatriste’s mortal enemies; she was the same girl-woman who, three years before, had led me to the Inquisition’s dungeons and, almost, to the stake.

“You must take me for a fool.”

She said nothing, and the oval of her face was like a pale stain in the darkness, although there was still that glint of moonlight in her eyes. I noticed that she was edging closer and closer. Her body was so near now that the guard of her dagger was digging into my thigh.

“Once I told you that I loved you,” she whispered.

And she kissed me on the mouth.

 

 

 

The only sources of light in the alleyway were a lit window and the grubby, smoky glow from a torch fixed in a ring on the wall next to the tavern door. Everything else lay in darkness, which meant that it was easy to melt into the shadow provided by a dilapidated wall that gave onto an abandoned garden. We positioned ourselves where we could see the door and window of the tavern. At the other end of the street, in the neighboring gloom of Calle de Tudescos, we could see a few ladies of the night casting their bait—with little success. Now and then, men, singly or in groups, would enter or leave the inn. Voices and laughter emerged from inside, and occasionally we caught a line from a song or the sound of a chaconne being strummed on a guitar. A drunk staggered over to where we were sitting in order to relieve himself and got the devil of a fright when I unsheathed my dagger, held it between his eyes, and told him in no uncertain terms to take himself and his bladder elsewhere. He must have assumed we were engaged in carnal business, because he said nothing, but stumbled off, weaving from one side of the street to another. Close by me, Angélica de Alquézar, vastly amused, was trying not to laugh.

“He took us for something we’re not,” she said, “and thought we were doing something we’re not.”

She seemed delighted with the whole situation—the strange place, the late hour, the danger. Perhaps, or so I wanted to believe, she was equally delighted to have me as her companion. Earlier, we had seen the night watch in the distance: a constable and four catchpoles armed with shields and swords and carrying a lantern. This had obliged us to take a different route, first, because the use of a sword by a boy of my years, just below the decreed limit, might be taken ill by the law. A far more serious danger, however, was the fact that Angélica’s male costume would not have survived scrutiny by the catchpoles, and such an event, while pleasant and amusing in a stage play, could have grave consequences in real life. The wearing of men’s clothes by women was strictly forbidden and was sometimes even banned in the theater. Indeed, it was only allowed if the actress was playing the part of a wronged or dishonored maiden—like Petronila and Tomasa in
The Garden of Juan Fernández
or Juana in
Don Gil of the Green Breeches
(both by Tirso), or Clavela in Lope’s
The Little French Maid
, and other such delicious characters in similar situations—who had a genuine excuse for going in search of their honor and of marriage and were not disguising themselves for vicious, capricious, or whorish reasons.

This zealous desire to regulate clothing came not only from the prudes and hypocrites who later filled the bawdy houses (although that’s another story) but from the Church, which, through the offices of royal confessors, bishops, priests, and nuns (and we have always had more of them than a muleteers’ inn has bedbugs and ticks), was striving to save our souls and to stop the devil getting his own way, so much so that wearing men’s apparel came to be considered an aggravating factor when sending women to the stake in autos-da-fé. Yes, even the Holy Office of the Inquisition had a hand in the matter, as it did—and, indeed, still has—in so many aspects of life in this poor wretched Spain of ours.

That night, however, I was not feeling in the least wretched, hidden there in the shadows with Angélica de Alquézar, opposite the Tavern of the Dog. We were sitting on my cloak, waiting, and now and then our bodies touched. She was looking at the door of the inn, and I was looking at her, and sometimes, when she moved, the spluttering torch on the wall opposite would illuminate her profile, the whiteness of her skin, a few locks of blond hair escaping from beneath her felt cap. In her tight-fitting doublet and breeches, she resembled a young page, but that impression was given the lie when a brighter light fell upon her pale, fixed, resolute gaze. Occasionally, she appeared to be studying me with great calm and penetration, peering into the innermost recesses of my soul. And when she had finished, and before she resumed her watch on the inn door, the lovely line of her mouth would curve into a smile.

“Tell me something about yourself,” she said suddenly.

I placed my sword between my legs and sat for a while, nonplussed, not knowing what to say. Finally, I spoke about the first time I had seen her, in Calle de Toledo, when she was still little more than a child. I spoke about the Fuente del Acero, the dungeons of the Inquisition, the shame of the auto-da-fé, about her letter to me in Flanders, about how I had thought of her when the Dutch charged us at the Ruyter Mill and at the Terheyden barracks, while I was running after Captain Alatriste, carrying the flag, convinced that I was going to die.

“What is war like?”

She seemed to be paying close attention to my mouth, to me or to my words. I suddenly felt very grown-up. Almost old.

“Dirty,” I said simply. “Dirty and gray.”

She shook her head slowly, as if pondering this thought. Then she asked me to go on talking, and the dirt and the grayness were relegated to just one part of my memory. I rested my chin on the hilt of my sword and talked more about us—her and me. About our meeting in the Alcázar in Seville and the ambush she had led me into next to the pillars of Hercules. About our first kiss as I stood on the running board of her carriage, moments before I had to fight for my life with Gualterio Malatesta. That, more or less, is what I said. No words of love, no feelings. I merely described our meetings, the part of my life that had to do with her, and I did so with as much equanimity as possible, detail by detail, just as I remembered it and always would.

“Don’t you believe that I love you?” she said.

We gazed at each other for what seemed like centuries, and my head started to swim as if I had drunk a potion. I opened my mouth to say something—although quite what I didn’t know—or to kiss her perhaps. Not the kind of kiss she had given me in the Plaza de Santo Domingo, but a long, hard kiss, filled with a simultaneous desire to bite and caress, and with all the vigor of youth about to burst in my veins. And she smiled at me, her lips only inches from my mouth, with the serene certainty of someone who knows and waits and is capable of transforming mere chance into a man’s inevitable fate, as if long before I was born, everything had been written down in an ancient book which she kept in her possession.

“Yes, I believe . . .” I started to say.

Then her expression changed. Her eyes shifted rapidly back to the tavern door, and I followed her gaze. Two men had come out into the street, hats pulled down low over their eyes; there was a furtive air about them as they put on their cloaks. One of them was wearing a yellow doublet.

 

 

 

We followed them cautiously through the dark city streets. We did our best not to make a noise as we walked, trying not to lose sight of their black shapes ahead of us. Fortunately, they suspected nothing and followed a clear route: from Calle de Tudescos to Calle de la Verónica, and from there to Postigo de San Martín, which they followed as far as San Luis de los Franceses. There they paused to doff their hats to a priest who was just coming out of the church, accompanied by an altar boy and a page bearing a lantern, obviously setting out to give someone the last rites. In the brief light cast by that lantern, I had a chance to study the two men we were following: apart from his eyes, the face of the man in the yellow doublet was entirely hidden by his black hat and cloak; he was wearing shoes and hose, and when he removed his hat, I noticed that he had fair hair. The other man was wearing a featherless hat, boots, and a gray cloak, which his sword lifted up behind; and as he was leaving the Tavern of the Dog, I caught a glimpse of his belt and noticed that, as well as the sword buckled on over his thick jerkin, he had a fine pair of pistols, too.

“They look like dangerous men,” I whispered to Angélica.

“And does that worry you?”

I was too offended to reply. The men continued walking, and we followed behind. A little farther on, in San Luis, next to the stone cross that still marks the site of one of the city’s old gates, we passed the stalls where they sold bread or food and drinks during the day; they were all closed and there was not a soul in sight. In Calle del Caballero de Gracia, the men stopped in a doorway to avoid a light advancing toward them; as the light passed us, we saw that it was a midwife hurrying to assist at a birth, her path lit by a nervous, harried husband. Then the two men continued on, always keeping to the part of the street where the moonlight did not reach. We pursued them for a fair distance through dark streets, past barred windows with shutters or lowered blinds, past startled cats, past the oily flames of candles in niches containing images of the Virgin or of saints, and, in the distance, we caught the occasional warning cry of someone emptying a chamber pot into the street. From an alleyway came the sound of clashing steel, of furious fighting, and the two men stopped to listen; the incident clearly held no interest for them, however, because they did not linger. When Angélica and I reached the same spot, a figure, his cloak masking his face, ran past us, sword in hand. I peered cautiously down the alley and saw nothing but more barred windows and flowerpots; then I heard someone at the far end moan. I sheathed my sword—I had whisked it out at the sight of the fugitive—and made as if to go to the aid of the wounded man, but Angélica gripped my arm.

“It’s not our business.”

“But someone might be dying,” I protested.

“We’ll all die one day.”

And she strode off after the two men, obliging me to follow her through the dark city. For that was how it was in Madrid at night: dark, uncertain, and threatening.

 

 

 

 

We followed the men as far as a house in the narrow upper part of Calle de los Peligros, halfway between Calle del Caballero de Gracia and the Convento de las Vallecas. Angélica and I stood in the street, unsure what to do, until she suggested that we take shelter beneath an arcade. We sat down on a bench hidden behind a stone pillar. It was getting colder and so I offered her my cloak, which she had already refused twice. This time she accepted, on condition that it serve to cover us both. And so I placed it over my shoulders and hers, which meant, of course, that we had to sit very close. You can imagine my state of mind. Head spinning, I sat resting my hands on the guard of my sword, filled by an inner excitement that prevented me from stringing two thoughts together. She, with lovely ease, kept watch on the house opposite. She seemed tenser now, but still showed a serenity and self-control admirable in a girl of her age and social class. We talked quietly, our shoulders touching. She still would not tell me what we were doing there.