The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet (19 page)

7
.
THE FENCER’S ARMS

Don Francisco de Quevedo angrily threw down his cloak and hat on a stool and unfastened his ruff. The news could not be worse. “There’s nothing to be done,” he said, unbuckling his sword. “Guadalmedina refuses even to talk about the matter.”

I stared out of the window. The threatening, gray clouds filling the Madrid sky above the rooftops of Calle del Niño made everything seem even grimmer. Don Francisco had spent two hours with Guadalmedina, trying, unsuccessfully, to convince the king’s confidant of Captain Alatriste’s innocence. Álvaro de la Marca had said that even if Alatriste were the victim of a conspiracy, his flight from justice had complicated everything. Quite apart from killing two catchpoles and badly wounding a third, he had left Saldaña with a broken nose and inflicted further injuries on the count himself. “In short,” concluded don Francisco, “he’s determined to see him hanged.”

“But they were friends,” I protested.

“No friendship could withstand this. Furthermore, this really is a very strange affair.”

“I hope at least
you
believe his story.”

The poet sat down in the armchair made of walnut in which the late Duke of Osuna used to sit when he visited the house. On the table next to it lay paper and quills, a copper inkwell and sandbox, as well as a snuffbox and several books, among them a Seneca and a Plutarch.

“If I didn’t believe the captain,” he said, “I wouldn’t have gone to see Guadalmedina.”

He stretched out his legs and crossed his ankles. He was looking abstractedly at a sheet of paper, the top half of which bore his own clear, vigorous handwriting—the first four lines of a sonnet which I had read while I was waiting.

I went over to where don Francisco kept his wine—a sideboard decorated with a frieze made of squares of green glass, beneath a painting depicting Troy ablaze—and poured a large glass of wine. Don Francisco took a pinch of the snuff. He was not a great smoker, but he was fond of that powder made from leaves brought from the Indies.

“I’ve known your master for a long time, my boy,” he went on. “He may be stubborn, he may sometimes go too far, but I know he would never raise his hand against the king.”

“The count knows him too,” I said, handing him the glass.

He nodded, having first sneezed twice.

“True. And I would bet my gold spurs that he knows the captain had nothing to do with it. However, there are only so many insults a nobleman can take: Alatriste’s impertinence, the wound he dealt him in Calle de los Peligros, the beating he received the other night . . . Guadalmedina’s pretty face still bears the marks left by your master before he escaped. Such things are hard to accept when you’re a grandee of Spain. It’s not so much the blow as not being able to make a fuss about it.”

He took a sip of his wine and sat looking at me, meanwhile still fiddling with the canister of tobacco.

“It’s lucky the captain got you out of there in time.”

He continued to regard me thoughtfully. Then he put down the canister and took a longer drink of wine.

“Whatever made you go after him?”

I muttered something about a boy’s curiosity, a liking for intrigues, et cetera. I knew that anyone trying to justify his actions tends to talk too much, and that too many explanations are always worse than a prudent silence. On the one hand, I was ashamed to admit that I had let myself be led into a trap by the poisonous young woman with whom, despite all, I was deeply in love. On the other hand, I considered Angélica de Alquézar to be my affair alone. I wanted to be the one to resolve that particular situation, but as long as my master was safely hidden away—we had received a discreet message from him through a safe channel—all explanations could wait. What mattered now was keeping him out of the hands of the torturers.

“I’m going to tell him what you’ve told me,” I said.

I buttoned up my doublet and picked up my hat. Rain had started speckling the windows, and so I put on my serge cloak as well. Don Francisco watched as I concealed my dagger amongst my clothes.

“Be careful no one follows you.”

There was every likelihood that someone would. The constables had questioned me at the Inn of the Turk, until I managed to convince them, by lying shamelessly, that I knew nothing about what had happened in Camino de las Minillas. La Lebrijana had been of no use to them either, even though they threatened and abused her, albeit only verbally. No one told her the real reason for the captain’s disappearance. It was attributed to a sword fight in which someone had died, but no further details were offered.

“Don’t worry. The rain will help to disguise me.”

I was less concerned about the officers of the law than I was about the people behind the conspiracy, because they, I imagined, would certainly be watching me. I was about to take my leave when the poet raised one finger, as if an idea had just occurred to him. Getting up, he went over to a small desk by the window and removed what looked like a jewelry box.

“Tell the captain that I’ll do whatever I can. It’s a shame poor don Andrés Pacheco passed away so recently, and that Medinaceli is in exile and the Admiral of Castile has fallen from grace. All three were very fond of me and they would have been perfect as intermediaries.”

It grieved me to hear this. Monsignor Pacheco had been the highest authority in the Spanish Inquisition, higher even than the Court of the Inquisition, which was presided over by our old enemy, the fearsome Dominican friar Emilio Bocanegra. As for Antonio de la Cerda, Duke of Medinaceli—who in time would become a close friend of don Francisco’s and my protector—his impulsive young man’s blood meant that he was now exiled from the court after using force to try to free a servant of his from prison. And the fall of the Admiral of Castile was public knowledge. His arrogance had caused unease in Catalonia during the recent visit to Aragon, after he had squabbled with the Duke of Cardona over who should sit next to the king when the latter was received in Barcelona. (His Majesty, by the way, returned without having extracted a single doubloon from the Catalans, for when he asked them for money for Flanders, they replied that they would uncom plainingly lay down life and honor for the king, as long as it involved no other expense, and declared that the treasury was the patrimony of the soul, and the soul belonged only to God.) The Admiral of Castile’s misfortunes were compounded at the public washing of feet on Maundy Thursday, when Philip IV stripped him of the privilege he normally enjoyed of handing the king a towel on which to dry his hands, asking the Marquis of Liche to do so instead. Humiliated, the admiral had protested to the king, asking his permission to withdraw. “I am the first knight of the kingdom,” he said, forgetting that he was standing before the first monarch of the world. And the king, annoyed, not only gave him permission to withdraw, he went even further. The admiral was to stay away from court, he said, until he received orders to the contrary.

“Do we have no one else?”

Don Francisco accepted that “we” as perfectly natural.

“Not of the stature of an Inquisitor General, a grandee of Spain, or a friend of the king, no, but I’ve asked for an audience with the count-duke. At least he doesn’t allow himself to be taken in by appearances. He’s intelligent and pragmatic.”

We exchanged a none too hopeful look. Then don Francisco opened the small box and took out a purse. He counted eight
doblones de a cuatro
—more or less half of what was there, I noticed—and handed them to me.

“The captain might well have need of that powerful gentleman, Sir Money,” he said.

How fortunate my master was, I thought, to have a man like don Francisco de Quevedo show him such loyalty. In our wretched Spain, even one’s closest friends tended to be freer with words or sword-thrusts than with money. Those five hundred and twenty-eight
reales
were minted in lovely pale gold; some bore the cross of the true religion, others the head of His Catholic Majesty, and others that of his late father, Philip III. And each and every one of those coins would have been quite capable of blinding one-eyed Justice and buying a little protection—as indeed would coins bearing the Turk’s crescent moon.

“Tell him I’m only sorry I can’t give him double the amount,” added the poet, returning the box to the desk, “but I’m still eaten up by debts. There’s the rent on this house—which I was fool enough to buy simply in order to evict that vile sodomite, Góngora—and that alone drains forty ducats and my life’s blood from me, and even the paper I write on has just had a new tax slapped on it. Oh well. Tell him to be very careful and not to go out into the street. Madrid has become an extremely dangerous place as far as he’s concerned. Of course, he might console himself by meditating on the thought that he is the sole author of his woes:

Those lines made me smile. Madrid was a dangerous place for the captain and for others as well, I thought proudly. It was all a question of who drew his sword first, and hunting a hare was not at all the same thing as hunting a wolf. I saw that don Francisco was smiling too.

“Then again, the most dangerous thing about Madrid is perhaps Alatriste himself,” he said drily, as if he had guessed what I was thinking. “Don’t you agree? Guadalmedina and Saldaña soundly beaten, a couple of catchpoles dead, another well on the way, and all in less time than it takes to say ‘knife.’ ” He picked up his glass of wine and looked at the rain falling outside. “That’s what I call killing.”

He sat for a moment, staring thoughtfully into his glass, then raised it to the window as if drinking a toast to the captain.

“Your master,” he concluded, “doesn’t carry a sword in his hand but a scythe.”

God was hurling the rain down in torrents on every inch of His good earth as I, wrapped in my cloak and with my hat dripping, walked to Lavapiés along Calle de la Com pañía, seeking shelter beneath arcades and eaves from the water that was falling now as if every dyke in Holland had burst over my head. And although I was soaked to the skin and up to my gaiters in mud, I walked unhurriedly through the curtain of rain and the drops that were riddling the puddles like musket fire. Zigzagging up various streets, just to see if anyone was following me, I finally reached Calle de la Comadre, jumping over rivulets of mud and water to do so, and after one last prudent glance around me, entered the inn, where I shook myself like a wet dog.

The inn smelled of sour wine, damp sawdust, and grime. The Fencer’s Arms (which bore its owner’s nickname) was one of the most disreputable drinking dens in Madrid. The landlord had been an out-and-out knave and a cheat—he was also said to have been a thief, notorious for his skill as a picklock—until old age caught up with him. Worn down by a lifetime of poverty and hardship, he had opened the inn and turned it into a receiving house for stolen goods—hence his nickname, the Fencer—sharing any profit he made with the thieves. The inn was a large, dark house built around a courtyard and surrounded by other crumbling edifices; its many doors led to twenty or so sordid bedrooms and to a grimy, smoke-stained dining room where one could eat and drink very cheaply. It was, in short, the perfect place for pilferers and ruffians in search of a little privacy. In their attempts to scrape a living, the criminal world came and went at all hours, swathed in cloaks, swords clanking, or laden down with suspicious bundles. The place was filled with roughs and purloiners and captains of crime, with nimble-fingered pickpockets and ladies of the night, with every kind of no-good bent on dishonoring the Castiles, Old and New, and who all flocked there as happily as rooks to a wheatfield or scribes to a lawsuit. The powers that be were nowhere to be seen, partly so as not to stir up trouble and partly because the Fencer—a wily man who knew his trade—was always generous when it came to greasing the palms of constables and buying the favor of the courts. Furthermore, he had a son-in-law serving in the house of the Marquis of Carpio, which meant that seeking refuge in the Fencer’s Arms was tantamount to taking sanctuary in a church. The other denizens, as well as being the cream of the criminal classes, were also blind, deaf, and dumb. No one there had a name or a surname, no one looked at anyone else, and even saying “Good afternoon” could be a reason for someone to slit your throat.

I found Bartolo Cagafuego sitting next to the fire in the kitchen, where the coals beneath the cooking pots were filling half the room with smoke. He was drowning his sorrows with sips from a mug of wine and some quiet talk with a comrade; he was, at the same time, keeping a watchful eye on his doxy, who, with her half-cloak draped over her shoulders, was agreeing on terms with a client. Cagafuego showed no sign of recognizing me when I went over to join him and to dry my wet clothes, which immediately began to steam in the heat. He continued his conversation, the subject of which was a recent encounter with a certain constable. This, he was explaining, had been resolved not with blood or shackles, but with money.