Purity of Blood

sentences of death at the stake. I trembled as if I had ague.

“Th-thirteen,” I stammered.

There was an anguishing silence, broken only by the scratching of the scribe’s pen. I hope he put it down right, I thought. Thirteen, not one year more.

That was when the thin priest bore in on me. His eyes gleamed even more brilliantly, with a new and unexpected glitter of scorn and loathing.

“And now,” he said, “we are going to talk about Captain Alatriste.”

VI. SAN GINES ALLEY

The gaming house was swarming with people betting their asses, even their souls. Amid the buzz of conversations and the coming and going of cardsharps and bootlickers hoping for tips, Juan Vicuna, a former sergeant of the horse guard wounded at Nieuwpoort, was crossing the room, trying to avoid spilling the Toro wine he was carrying in a jug, and looking around with satisfaction. On the half-dozen tables, cards and dice and money were changing hands, inspiring sighs, Holy Mothers! and flashes of naked greed. Gold and silver coins shone beneath the tallow lamps suspended from the domed brick ceiling, and business was all he could ask.

Vicuna’s watering hole was in a cellar on Cava de San Miguel, very close to the Plaza Mayor; and in it, deals of every sort allowed by the mandates of our lord and king were struck, and also, as Your Mercies may have adjudged, others, scarcely concealed, that were not. The variety was as diverse as the players’ imaginations, which in that day was considerable. They were playing ombre, polla, and one hundred—games that bled you slowly—as well as seven-up, reparolo, and others referred to as “quick and slick” because of the speed with which they left a man without money, speech, or breath. About them, the great Lope had written:

Like drawing out his swordfor one who has occasion,so the game is the persuasionfor one who seeks reward.

True that only a few months before, a royal decree had been issued prohibiting gaming houses, for our fourth Philip was young, well-intentioned, and—amply aided by his pious confessor—he believed in things such as the dogma of the Virgin Mary, the Catholic cause in Europe, and the moral regeneration of his subjects in the Old and New Worlds. Forbidding gambling, like the attempt to close the bawdyhouses, however—not to mention hopes for the Catholic cause in Europe—was wishing for the sky. Because if anything besides theater, running the bulls in the plazas, and something else I will mention in good time, impassioned Spaniards living beneath the rule of the Austrian monarchy, it was gambling.

Towns of three thousand inhabitants wore out eighteen thousand packs of cards each year, and card games were as often played in the streets—where sharps, cheats, and shills improvised games in which to fleece the naive—as they were in legal or clandestine houses, jails, brothels, taverns, and guardposts. Important cities like Madrid and Seville were anthills of meddlers and idlers with coins in their purses, ready to join in around the desencuadernada—the book without a binding, which was what a packet of cards was called—or a Juan Tarafe, a name the lowlife gave to dice games. Everyone gambled, common people and nobility, gentlemen and rogues; even ladies, who though they were not admitted into dens like Juan Vicuna’s, were assiduous patrons of the better gaming houses, as well versed in clubs, trumps, and points as the next one. And as may be expected of a violent, proud, and quick-to-draw-steel people like we were, and are, quarrels born of a game often ended with a “God’s bones!” and a fine collection of stab wounds.

Vicuna made it across the room, though not before carefully eyeing some scholars of the art, which is what he called the charlatans expert in palming and marking cards, men who always had a winner up their sleeves, heedful of where it fell. He also stopped to give a warm greeting to don Raul de la Poza, an hidalgo from a very wealthy Cuenca family, a black sheep with a taste for the spicier side of life, who was one of his best clients. A man of fixed habits, don Raul had just arrived, as he did every night, from a brothel on Calle Francos—where he was a regular— and now would not leave until dawn, in time to attend seven-o’clock mass at San Gines. Escudos were scudding across his table like sea foam on a stormy day, and always churning around him was a court of swindlers and sycophants who snuffed his candles for him, served his wine, and even brought a urinal if he was deep into the game and did not want to abandon a good hand. All in exchange for the barato, the real-or-two tip that came their way after every useful service.

That night, de la Poza was in the company of the Marques de Abades and other friends. That made Vicuna feel easier, for it was a rare day that three or four swaggering churls were not waiting to relieve de la Poza of his winnings as he left.

Diego Alatriste thanked his host for the Toro wine, quaffing it in one long draught. He was in his shirtsleeves, unshaven, sitting on a straw mattress in the discreet room Vicuna had outfitted in his gaming house so he would have a place to retire and rest. A shutter allowed him to see into the main room without being seen himself. Boots on, sword on the taboret, loaded pistol on the blanket, vizcaina dagger on the pillow, and eyes sharp when from time to time he glanced through the latticed wood, it was obvious that Alatriste was on his guard. The room had a back, nearly secret, door to a passageway that emerged under an arch in the Plaza Mayor. Vicuna noted that the captain had arranged his belongings so that they could be gathered up in a quick retreat toward that door, should it be necessary. In the forty-eight hours he’d spent hiding there, Diego Alatriste had not relaxed except to nod off for forty winks. Even so, late one afternoon when Vicuna came in quietly to see if his friend needed anything, he had been met by the menacing barrel of a pistol pointed right between his eyebrows.

Alatriste did not betray his impatience by asking questions. He handed the empty jar back to Vicuna and waited, looking at him with clear, unwavering eyes whose pupils were dilated in the dim light of the oil lamp on the table.

“He will be waiting for you in a half-hour,” said the old sergeant, “in San Gines alley.”

“How is he?”

“Fine. He has spent the last two days in the house of his friend the Duque de Medinaceli, and no one has bothered him. His name has not been made public, and the Law, the Inquisition, no one, is after him. The event, whatever it was, has not become public.”

The captain nodded slowly, reflectively. That quiet was not strange, it was logical. The Inquisition never set bells pealing until it had the last of the loose ends well tied up. And things were still half finished. The absence of news might be part of the trap.

“What are they saying in San Felipe?”

“Rumors.” Vicuna shrugged his shoulders. “That there was swordplay at La Encarnacion gate, that someone died…They put it down more to the nuns’ swains than anything else.”

“Have they been to my lodgings?”

“No. But Martin Saldana smells something. He was at the tavern. According to La Lebrijana, he said nothing specific but hinted a lot. The corregidor’s catchpoles are not showing themselves, he