The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet (15 page)

“This Captain Batiste, or Triste, or whatever his name is, doesn’t have much to recommend him, does he? He’s always getting you into trouble.”

I drew myself up, greatly offended that Angélica de Alquézar, of all people, should say such a thing.

“He’s my friend.”

She laughed softly, her hands resting on the balustrade. She smelled sweet, of roses and honey. It was a delicious smell, but I preferred the way she had smelled on the night when we kissed. My skin prickled to remember it. Fresh bread.

“You abandoned me in the middle of the street,” she said again.

“I did. How can I make it up to you?”

“By accompanying me again whenever I need you to.”

“At night?”

“Yes.”

“And with you dressed as a man?”

She stared at me as if I were an idiot.

“You can hardly expect me to go out dressed like this.”

“In answer to your question,” I said, “no, never again.”

“How very discourteous. Remember: you are in my debt.”

She was studying me again with the fixity of a dagger pointing at someone’s entrails. I should say that I, too, was very smartly turned out that day: all in black, my hair freshly washed, and a dagger tucked in my belt, at the back. Perhaps that gave me the necessary aplomb to hold her gaze.

“I’m not that much in your debt.”

“You’re a lout,” she said angrily, like a little girl who has failed to get her own way. “You obviously prefer the company of that Captain Sotatriste of yours.”

“As I said, he’s my friend.”

She pulled a scornful face.

“Of course. I know the refrain: Flanders and all that, swords, cursing, taverns, and whores. The gross behavior one expects of men.”

This sounded like a criticism, and yet I thought I heard a discordant note, as if, in some way, she regretted not being involved in that world herself.

“Anyway,” she added, “allow me to say that with friends like him, you don’t need enemies.”

“And which are you?”

She pursed her lips as if she really were considering her answer. Then, head on one side, not taking her eyes off me for a moment, she said:

“I’ve already told you that I love you.”

I trembled when she said this, and she noticed. She was smiling, as Lucifer might have smiled as he fell from heaven.

“That should be enough,” she added, “if you’re not a rogue, a fool, or a braggart.”

“I don’t know what I am, but I know that you’re more than enough to get me burned at the stake or garrotted.”

She laughed again, her hands folded almost modestly over the ample skirt and the mother-of-pearl fan that hung from her waist. I regarded the neat outline of her mouth. To hell with everything, I thought. Fresh bread, roses, and honey—and bare skin underneath. Had I not been where I was, I would have hurled myself upon those lips.

“You surely don’t think,” she said, “that you can have me for free.”

Before matters became dangerously complicated, there was time for an agreeable interlude, one that would have played well on the stage. The plot was hatched during a meal at El León, offered by Captain Alonso de Contreras, who was his usual talkative, congenial, and slightly boastful self. He presided over the occasion, leaning back against a barrel of wine on which we had deposited our capes, hats, and swords. The other guests were don Francisco de Quevedo, Lopito de Vega, my master, and myself, and we were all happily dispatching some good garlic soup and a thick beef and bacon stew. Our host Contreras was celebrating having finally been paid a sum of money that had, he claimed, been owed to him since the battle of Roncesvalles. We ended up discussing Moscatel’s steadfast opposition to Lopito and Laura’s love, a situation only made worse by the butcher’s discovery that Lopito and Diego Alatriste were now friends. The young man told us forlornly that he could only see his lady in secret—when she went out with her duenna to make some purchase, or else at mass in the church of Our Lady of the Miracles, where he, kneeling on his cloak, would observe her from afar. Sometimes, he even managed to approach and exchange a few tender words while he held, cupped in his hand—O supreme happiness—the holy water with which she made the sign of the cross. Given that Moscatel was determined to marry his niece to that vile pettifogger Saturnino Apolo, the poor girl had only two options: marriage to him or the nunnery, and so Lopito had about as much chance of marrying her as he would of finding a bride in the seraglio in Constantinople. Twenty men on horseback wouldn’t change her uncle’s mind. Besides, these were turbulent times, and what with the to-ings and fro-ings of both Turks and heretics, Lopito could, at any moment, be called on to resume his duties to the king, and that would mean losing Laura forever. This, as he admitted to us, had often led him to curse the similarly tangled situations described in his own father’s plays, because they were of no help whatsoever in resolving his problems.

This remark gave Captain Contreras a bold idea.

“It’s perfectly simple,” he said, crossing his legs. “Kidnap her and marry her—in good soldierly fashion.”

“That wouldn’t be easy,” replied Lopito glumly. “Moscatel is still paying several ruffians to guard the house.”

“How many?”

“The last time I tried to see her, there were four.”

“Good swordsmen?”

“On that occasion, I didn’t stay long enough to find out.”

Contreras smugly twirled his mustache and looked around, letting his eyes linger in particular on Captain Alatriste and don Francisco.

“The greater the number of Moors to fight, the greater the glory, don’t you agree, Señor de Quevedo?”

Don Francisco adjusted his spectacles and frowned, for it ill became a court favorite to get involved in a scandal involving kidnappings and sword fights. However, the presence of Alonso de Contreras, Diego Alatriste, and Lope’s son made it very hard for him to refuse.

“I’m afraid,” he said in resigned tones, “there’s nothing for it but to fight.”

“It might provide you with matter for a sonnet,” remarked Contreras, already imagining himself the hero of another poem.

“Or, indeed, a reason to spend a further period in exile.”

As for Captain Alatriste, who was leaning on the table before his mug of wine, the look he exchanged with his old comrade Contreras was an eloquent one. For men like them, such adventures were merely part of the job.

“And what about the boy?” asked Contreras, meaning me.

I felt almost offended. I considered myself a young man of considerable experience and so I smoothed my nonex istent mustache, as I had seen my master do, and said:

“The ‘boy’ will fight too.”

The way in which I said this brought me an approving smile from the
miles gloriosus
—the boastful soldier Contreras—and a glance from Diego Alatriste.

“When my father finds out,” moaned Lopito, “he’ll kill me.”

Captain Contreras roared with laughter.

“Your illustrious father knows a thing or two about kidnappings and elopements. The Phoenix was always a great one for the ladies!”

There followed an embarrassed silence, and we all stuck nose and mustache in our respective mugs of wine. Even Contreras did so, suddenly remembering that Lopito himself was the illegitimate child born of just such an affair, even though, as I mentioned before, Lope had subsequently acknowledged him. The young man, however, did not appear offended. He knew his father’s reputation better than anyone. After a few sips of wine and a diplomatic clearing of the throat, Contreras took up the thread again:

“There’s nothing like a fait accompli; besides, that’s what we military men are like, isn’t it? Direct, bold, proud, straight to the point. I remember once, in Cyprus it was . . .”

And he immediately launched into another story. When he had done, he took a long draft of wine, sighed nostal gically, and looked at Lopito.

“So, young man, are you truly willing to join yourself in holy matrimony to that woman, until death do you part, et cetera?”

Lopito held his gaze unblinking.

“As long as God is God, and beyond death itself.”

“No one’s asking that much of you. If you stick with her until death, you’ll be doing more than your duty already. Do we gentlemen here have your word as a gentleman?”

“On my life, you do.”

“Then there’s nothing more to be said.” Contreras gave the table a satisfied thump. “Can anyone resolve matters on the ecclesiastical side?”

“My Aunt Antonia is abbess of the Convento de las Jerónimas,” Lopito said. “She’ll gladly take us in. And Father Francisco, her chaplain, is also Laura’s confessor and knows Señor Moscatel well.”

“Will he agree to help if he’s needed?

“Oh, yes.”

“And what about the young lady? Will your Laura be prepared to be put to the test like this?”

Lopito said quite simply that she would, and there was no further discussion of the matter. Everyone agreed to take part, we all drank to a happy conclusion, and don Francisco de Quevedo, as was his wont, contributed a few appropriate lines of verse, not his this time, but Lope’s:

Everyone drank to this as well, and eight or ten toasts later, using the table as a map and the mugs of wine as the main protagonists, Captain Contreras—his speech now slightly uncertain, but his resolution firm—invited us to pull up our chairs so that he could lay out his plan to us. His assault tactics, as he termed them, were as detailed as if we were preparing to send a hundred lancers into Oran rather than plotting a small-scale attack on a private house in Calle de la Madera.

 

 

 

 

A house with two doors is always difficult to guard, and don Gonzalo Moscatel’s house had two doors. A couple of nights later, we, the conspirators, our faces muffled by our cloaks, were standing in the shadows of a nearby arcade opposite the main door. Captain Contreras, don Francisco de Quevedo, Diego Alatriste, and I stood watching the musicians who, by the light of the lantern one of them had brought with him, were taking up their positions before the barred window of the house in question, on the corner of Calle de la Madera and Calle de la Luna. The plan was a bold and simple one: a serenade at one door, attracting protests and alarm, followed by a skirmish with swords, while escape was made via the other door. Military planning aside, due attention had also been paid to preserving the lady’s honor. Since Laura Moscatel was free neither to choose whom she would marry nor to leave her house, the only way of bending the will of her stubborn uncle was a kidnapping followed immediately by a wedding to make amends. The abbess aunt and the chaplain-cum-family-friend—the latter’s pastoral scruples having been soothed by a purseful of doubloons—had both been forewarned by Lopito and were, at that moment, waiting in the Convento de las Jerónimas, where the bride would be taken as soon as she was freed, so that everything could be seen to be proper and aboveboard.

“An excellent adventure, praise God,” muttered a gleeful Captain Contreras.

He was doubtless recalling his youth, when such adventures were more common. He was leaning against the wall, his face concealed by hat and cloak, between Diego Alatriste and don Francisco de Quevedo, who were equally well disguised, so that only the glint of their eyes could be seen. I was watching the street. In order to reassure don Francisco somewhat and to preserve appearances, our arrival on the scene had been made to look like mere coincidence, as if we were a group of men who just happened to be passing. Even the poor musicians, hired by Lopito de Vega, had no idea what was about to occur. They only knew that they had been paid to serenade a certain lady—a widow, they had been told—at eleven o’clock at night, outside her window. There were three musicians, the youngest of whom was fifty if he was a day. They were standing ready with guitar, lute, and tambourine, the latter played by the singer, who launched without further ado into the famous song:

Not the most original of sentiments, it has to be said, but this was, nevertheless, a very popular ditty at the time. The singer got no further than these lines, however, for no sooner had he concluded that first verse than lights were lit inside the house, and don Gonzalo Moscatel could be heard swearing by all that’s holy. Then the front door was flung open and there he stood, sword in hand, wildly threatening the musicians and their progenitors and declaring that he would skewer them like capons. This, he roared, was no time to be disturbing honest households. He was accompanied—they were presumably spending the evening together—by the lawyer Saturnino Apolo, who was armed with a short sword and was carrying the lid of an earthenware jar as buckler. At this point, four nasty-looking individuals came bursting out of the coach house and immediately fell upon the musicians. The latter, who had done nothing wrong, found themselves being roundly punched and beaten with the flat of their assailants’ swords.