A sentry called out a challenge. The soldiers answered it. 'What are you bastards doing back here?' the sentry demanded. 'You only went out an hour ago.'
'We've got a lost gentleman, a lieutenant, with us,' the trooper named FernA?n replied. 'Sergeant Diaz sent us back with him-couldn't very well leave him running around loose for some English cabrA?n to knock him over the head.'
'I may be a lieutenant, but I am not a child,' Lope said as he advanced. FernA?n and Rodrigo and the sentry all found that very funny. What sort of lieutenants have they dealt with? he wondered. Or am I better off not knowing?
The sentry did salute him in proper fashion, and let him go in. A sergeant inside should have taken his name, but the fellow was dozing in front of a charcoal brazier. Lope slipped past him and into his room, where he pulled off his hat and boots and sword belt and went to bed. Diego, his servant, already lay there snoring. Diego, from everything Lope had seen, would sleep through the Last Judgment.
I might as well have no servant at all, de Vega thought, drifting toward sleep. But a gentleman without a servant would be. Unimaginable was the word that should have formed in his mind.
What did occur to him was better off. He yawned, stretched, and stopped worrying about it.
When he woke, it was still dark outside. He felt rested enough, though. In fall and winter, English nights stretched ungodly long, and the hours of July sunshine never seemed enough to make up for them. Diego didn't seemed to have moved; his snores certainly hadn't changed rhythm. If he ever felt rested enough, he'd given no sign of it.
Leaving him in his dormouse-like hibernation, Lope put on what he'd taken off the night before, adjusting the bright pheasant plume in his braided-leather hatband to the proper jaunty angle. He resisted the temptation to slam the door as he went out to get breakfast. My virtue surely piles up in heaven, he thought.
He joined a line of soldiers who yawned and knuckled their red eyes. Breakfast was wine and a cruet of olive oil-both imported from Spain, as neither the grape nor the olive flourished in this northern clime-and half a loaf of brown bread. The bread was local, and at least as good as he would have had back in Madrid.
He was just finishing when his superior's servant came up to him. Captain GuzmA?n's Enrique was the opposite of his own Diego in every way: tall, thin, smarter than a servant had any business being, and alarmingly diligent. 'Good day, Lieutenant,' Enrique said. 'My principal requests the honor of your company at your earliest convenience.'
Gulping down the last of the wine, Lope got to his feet. 'I am at his Excellency's service, of course.' No matter how flowery a servant made an order, an order it remained.
No matter how much Lope hurried, Enrique got to Guzman's office ahead of him. 'Here's de Vega,' he told GuzmA?n in dismissive tones. As a captain's man, he naturally looked down his nose at a creature so lowly as a lieutenant, even a senior lieutenant.
' Buenos dias, your Excellency,' Lope said as he walked in. He swept off his hat and bowed.
'Good day,' Captain Baltasar Guzman replied, nodding without rising from his seat. He was a dapper little man whose mustaches and chin beard remained wispy with youth: though Lope's superior, he was a good fifteen years younger. He had some sort of connection with the great noble house of GuzmA?n-the house of, among others, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, commander of the Armada-which explained his rank. He wasn't a bad officer, though, in spite of that. Enrique wouldn't let him be a bad officer, Lope thought.
'And how may I serve you today, your Excellency?' he asked.
Captain Guzman wagged a forefinger at him. 'I hear you were out late last night.'
'She was very pretty,' de Vega replied with dignity. 'Very friendly, too.'
'No doubt,' Guzman said dryly. 'Our job, though, is to hunt down the English who are
'I wasn't on duty then.' Lope tried to change the subject: 'Is there any new word on his Majesty's health?'
'He's dying,' Baltasar Guzman said, and crossed himself. 'The gout, the sores. Last I heard, those are getting worse. He may go before the Lord tomorrow, he may last a year, he may even last two. But dying he is.'
Lope crossed himself, too. 'Surely his son will prove as illustrious as he has himself.'
'Surely,' GuzmA?n said, and would not meet his eyes. Philip II was no great captain, no warrior whom men would follow into battle with a song on their lips and in their hearts. But such captains did his bidding. In his more than forty years of gray, competent rule, he had beaten back the Turks in the Mediterranean and brought England and Holland out of heresy and back into the embrace of the Catholic Church. More flamboyant men had accomplished far less.
His son, the prince who would be Philip III, also was not flamboyant. But, from everything Lope de Vega had heard-from everything everyone had heard-he was not particularly competent, either. Lope said, 'God will protect us, as He has till now.'
Guzman crossed himself again. 'May it be so.' Now he did look de Vega full in the face. 'And, of course, our duty is to help God as best we can. What are your plans for today, Lieutenant? — leaving Englishwomen out of the bargain, I mean.'
'There is to be a play this afternoon at the Theatre,' Lope replied. 'I shall go there and stand among the groundlings, listen to them, see the play, and chat with the actors afterwards if I have the chance.'
'A duty you hate, I'm sure,' Captain GuzmA?n said. 'I do wonder whether your attendance is for the benefit of Queen Isabella and King Albert, God bless them; for the benefit of King Philip, God bless him and keep him; or for the benefit of one Lope FA©lix de Vega Carpio.'
'And may God bless me as well,' de Vega said. Guzman's nod looked grudging, but it was a nod. Lope went on, 'When I stand among the ordinary English, I hear their grumbles. And when I mingle with the actors, I may hear more. Some of them are more than actors. Some of them have connections with the English nobles who are their patrons. Some of them, now and again, do their patrons' bidding.'
'Someof them indeed have connections with their patrons.' Guzman gave the word an obscene twist.
But then he sighed. 'Still, I can't say you're wrong. Some of them
'Just as you say, your Excellency, so shall it be,' Lope promised, doing his best to hide his relief. He turned to leave.
Baltasar Guzman let him take one step toward the door, then raised a finger and stopped him in his tracks. 'Oh-one other thing, de Vega.'
'Your Excellency?'
'I want a report that deals with matters political. Literary criticism has its place. I do not argue with that.
Its place, however, is not here. Understand me?'
'Yes, your Excellency.' You're a Philistine, your Excellency. It's God's own miracle you can read and write at all, your Excellency. But GuzmA?n was the man with the rank. Guzman was the man with the family.
Guzman was also the man with the literate, intelligent, curious servant. As de Vega left the office, Enrique said, 'Sir, your English is much better than mine. I would be glad to hear what these playwrights are doing, to compare them to our own.'
Keeping Enrique sweet might help keep Captain Guzman sweet. And Lope was passionate about the theatre. He wished his useless Diego were passionate about anything but slumber. 'Of course, Enrique. When I get back.'
The Theatre stood in Shoreditch, beyond the walls of London and, in fact, beyond the jurisdiction of the city. Before the Catholic restoration, the grim Protestants who called themselves Puritans had kept theatres out of London proper. Many of the same men still governed the capital of England. They had made a peace of sorts with the Church, but not with gaiety; there still were no theatres within the bounds of the city.
Lope's cloak and hat shielded him from the endless autumn drizzle as he made his way out through Bishopsgate and up Shoreditch High Street. Leaving the wall behind didn't mean leaving behind what still seemed like a city, even if it was no longer exactly London. Stinking tenements lined narrow streets and leaned toward one
