She laughed. If it did not sound pretentious, I would tell you that her laughter was argentine. It rang like the polished silver that artisans in the port of Guadalajara hang on the door of their shops on Corpus Christi feast day.
“That is how persons from Biscay talk.” I was unsure of the difference, but I was vaguely irritated. “Onate is in Guipuzcoa.”
I felt a compelling need to impress her, without the least notion of how. Clumsily, I tried to pick up the thread of my disquisition on the beneficial properties of sweets. I lowered my voice to sound more manly. “Now. In regard to melancholy humors…”
I was interrupted when a dog raced toward us, a large brown mastiff that had been charging about the area. Instinctively, I stepped between it and Angelica. The dog ran off without looking for a fight, as had the lion from don Quixote, and when I turned to look again, Angelica was observing me as she had when I first spoke, her curiosity apparent.
“And what do you know of my humors?”
A note of defiance resonated in her voice, and those intensely blue eyes had become very serious; there was no suggestion of a child in them. Those lips! Still parted after her question. That soft, rounded chin. Those blond spirals of curls touching shoulders covered with delicate Flemish lace. I was enslaved. I tried to swallow without being obvious.
“I know nothing, as yet,” I replied, as candidly as I could. “But I know I would give my life for you.”
I may have blushed as I spoke those words, but there are things you must say when it is time to say them, or risk regretting it all your life. Although what one may later regret is having spoken them at all.
“I would give my life,” I repeated.
There was a long, thrilling silence. The chaperone was coming back, black beneath her white headgear, like a magpie of bad omen, with the flask of water in her hand. The dragon was about to retake possession of my damsel, so I started to leave, wanting to put distance between us. But Angelica was still studying me as if she were able to read my thoughts. She put her hands to her throat and pulled out a delicate gold chain with a small charm hanging from it. She undid the clasp, and put the chain in my hands.
“Perhaps one day you may die,” she whispered.
As she spoke those words, her enigmatic eyes never left mine, and at the same time, a smile came to her lips. It was a smile so beautiful, so perfect, so filled with all the light in a Spanish sky vast as the abyss of her eyes, that I wanted to die that instant, sword in hand, shouting her name as there in Flanders my father had shouted the name of his king, his homeland, and his flag. After all was said and done, I thought, maybe those things were all one and the same.
IV. THE ASSAULT
Far in the distance, a dog barked four times, and after that…silence. Well armed, with pistol, sword, and dagger at his waist, Captain Alatriste looked at the moon that seemed about to impale itself upon the tower of Las Benitas convent, and then, turning his head from side to side, his eyes swept the shadowy corners of La Encarnacion plaza. The coast was clear.
The captain adjusted his buffalo skin jerkin and tossed back the tails of the short cape over his shoulders. As if that had been a signal, three dark silhouettes emerged from the gloom, two from one side of the plaza and one from the other, and moved toward the convent wall. Light shone from one window; almost immediately it was extinguished, then quickly relighted.
“It is she,” whispered don Francisco de Quevedo.
He was stationed beside the wall, all in black—hat, clothing, and cape—and he had not drunk a drop all night despite the chill—in order, he said, to have a steady hand. I could not see him, but I heard him slowly draw his sword halfway from its scabbard and then let it drop back, testing whether it moved smoothly. And I also heard him mutter a few words of his own composition:
I wondered briefly whether don Francisco was reciting verse to relieve his anxiety, to counter the cold, or whether he truly had ice in his veins and was capable of composing poems at the very Gates of Hell. Whatever the case, this was not the time to give the proper due to the flower of his satiric genius. My attention was focused on the captain, whose dark profile, masked by shadow, was still as a statue beneath the broad brim of his hat. The three dark shapes that had slipped across the plaza earlier were also frozen, attempting to remain unseen. The dog barked again, only twice this time, and from the hill of Los Canos del Peral came, as answer, the faint nickers of the mules of the waiting coach. With that sound, Diego Alatriste turned toward me. His eyes were palest gray in the moonlight.
“Be very cautious,” he said.
He put his hand on my shoulder. I took a deep breath and bolted across the plaza, feeling like the boy who stuck his head in the wolf’s mouth, aware of the captain’s eyes on me. In my ears, the homage don Francisco was kind enough to improvise, rewriting some verses of his own:
My heart was pounding as hard as it had earlier that day when I had been so close to Angelica de Alquezar. Or perhaps more. I felt an almost unbearable tightness in my stomach and my throat, and unfamiliar drums were sounding in my ears as I passed the crouching shapes of don Vicente de la Cruz and his two sons. They were huddled against the wall, and I could see the glint of metal from between the folds of their capes.
“Quickly, lad,” whispered the father, impatient.
I nodded, and followed the wall toward the carriage guard at the corner. There I surreptitiously crossed myself, commending myself to the same God whose holy sanctuary I was about to violate. With no difficulty at all—at the time I was as agile as a monkey—I climbed up onto the pillar, then, teetering slightly on its narrow ledge, I reached for the wall and pulled myself up. I sat there an instant, astride, bent low so as not to be silhouetted against the moonlight. On one side below were the street and the plaza, and the silent shapes of my companions hugging the wall; on the other lay the shadowy silence of Las Benitas’s garden, broken only by the intermittent chirping of a cricket. I waited until the beating of my heart faded from my eardrums before moving again. And when I did, I felt the charm Angelica de Alquezar had given me at the Acero fountain swing out from inside my shirt, and heard the
I had spent hours studying it. It looked very old, and on it were engraved some strange and fascinating symbols.
I stuffed the amulet back into my shirt, where it lay against my bare skin, hoping and praying that it would bring me the luck I would need in this venture. The branches of the nearest apple tree scratched my face as I swung forward onto a limb and then, after hanging by my hands a few seconds, dropped the six or seven feet to the ground. I fell and rolled, without significant damage, brushed the dirt from my clothing, and, praying to the Holy Mother of God that there were no
