The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet

1. THE CORRAL DE LA CRUZ

Diego Alatriste was in a devil of a hurry. A new play was about to be performed at the Corral de la Cruz, and there he was on the Cuesta de la Vega, dueling with some fellow whose name he didn’t even know. The play was by Tirso de Molina, and any first performance of a play by Tirso was a great occasion in Madrid. The whole city, it seemed, was either crammed into the theater or else forming a queue outside in the street, and no one in that queue would have thought it unreasonable to knife his neighbor if it meant getting a seat or even standing room. There was, however, neither rhyme nor reason to what he was doing now, namely, getting involved in a minor skirmish following a chance collision on a street corner. Such conflicts were, of course, a regular enough occurrence in the Madrid of the day, where it was as common to unsheathe one’s sword as to cross oneself. “Why don’t you look where you’re going, sir!” “Why don’t you, my man—are you blind?” “God’s teeth.” “God’s and anyone else’s.” And it was that disrespectful “my man”—for the other fellow was young and quick to anger—which had made a fight inevitable. “You, sir,” Alatriste had said, stroking his mustache, “can call me ‘my man’ or even ‘boy’ all you like, but only with sword and dagger in hand on the Cuesta de la Vega, which is, after all, just a step away—always assuming, of course, that you’re gentleman enough to spare me the time.” The other man did apparently have time to spare, or was, at the least, unprepared to modify his language. And so there they were, overlooking the Manzanares River, on the top of a hill to which they had walked, side by side, like two comrades, without saying a word, and without unsheathing the swords or daggers that were now clashing loudly—cling, clang—and glinting in the afternoon sun.

After an initial cautious circling of blades, Alatriste was startled into full attention by the first serious thrust, which he parried with some difficulty. He was more irritated with himself than with his opponent, irritated with his own irritation. This was not a good state of mind to be in; any sword fight, when life and health are at stake, requires both a cool head and a steady hand. If you lack either, there is a risk that your irritation—or whatever other emotion you happen to be feeling—might slip from your body, along with your soul, through some previously unnoticed buttonhole in your doublet. But what could he do? He had left the Inn of the Turk in that same black mood, following an argument with Caridad la Lebrijana. The argument had erupted as soon as she returned home from mass and had involved smashed crockery, slammed doors, and a consequent delay in setting off for the theater. The chance encounter on the corner of Calle del Arcabuz and Calle de Toledo—which would ordinarily have been resolved with common sense and reasonable words—had instead channeled all his ill humor into this duel. Anyway, it was too late to turn back now. The other man was in deadly earnest and, all honor to him, very good with a blade and agile as a deer. He seemed to Alatriste, from his manner of fighting, to have a soldier’s technique: a wide stance, a quick hand, and many a riposte and counter-riposte. He would unleash fierce attacks, intent on wounding, give stabbing thrusts, then withdraw as if to cut and reverse, always watching for the moment when he might lunge forward on his left foot and hook the hilt of his enemy’s blade with his dagger. It was an old trick, but effective if the person performing it had a good eye and an even better hand. Alatriste, however, was an older and more battle-hardened fighter, and so he kept moving in a semicircle in the direction of his opponent’s left hand, thus thwarting his intentions and wearing him out. He also took the opportunity to study his opponent, who was a good-looking young man in his twenties. Despite his city clothes—short suede boots, an over-doublet of fine cloth, and the brown cape which he had placed on the ground along with his hat so as to be able to move more freely—he had, at least to the eye of an expert, a soldierly air about him: confident, brave, tight-lipped, and certainly no braggart, but concentrating on the job at hand. He was perhaps from a good family. The captain ignored a feint and made a circling movement to the right so that the sun was in his adversary’s eyes. He silently cursed himself. By now, the first act of The Garden of Juan Fernández would be in full swing.

He decided to finish the business, although not so hastily that it might work against him. Besides, there was no point in complicating his life further by killing a man in broad daylight, and on a Sunday. His opponent made a lunge, which Alatriste parried, making as if to deliver a straightforward blow, but instead shifting to the right, lowering his sword to protect his own chest and, in passing, dealing the other man an ugly cut to the head with his dagger. A bystander might have described this as both unorthodox and somewhat underhand, but there were no by standers. Besides, María de Castro would already be on stage, and it was still a fair walk to the Corral de la Cruz. This was no time for niceties. More important, the strategy had worked. The young man turned pale and fell to his knees, bright red blood gushing from his temple. He had dropped his dagger and was resting all his weight on his sword, which buckled slightly beneath him. Alatriste sheathed his own sword, then went over and disarmed the wounded man by gently kicking the blade from under him. Then he held him up so that he wouldn’t fall, took a clean handkerchief from the sleeve of his doublet and bandaged the gash in the man’s head as best he could.

“Will you be all right on your own?” he asked.

The young man looked at him, confused, but did not reply. Alatriste snorted impatiently.

“I have things to do,” he said.

The man nodded weakly. He made as if to get up, and Alatriste helped him to his feet, letting him lean on his shoulder. The blood was still flowing beneath the improvised bandage, but the man was young and strong. The bleeding would soon stop.

“I’ll send help,” added Alatriste.

He couldn’t wait to be gone. He looked at the tower of the Alcázar Real that rose up above the walls, then back toward the long Segovia bridge. No constables—that was one good thing—and no bluebottles either. No one. The whole of Madrid was watching Tirso’s play, and there he was, wasting time. One way to solve the problem, he thought impatiently, would be to slip a real to some errand boy or footboy, of the sort usually to be be found loitering near the city gate, waiting for travelers. They could then take the stranger back to his inn—or indeed to hell or wherever else he might choose to go. He helped the wounded man sit down on a large boulder that had once formed part of the city wall. Then he restored to him hat, cape, sword, and dagger.

“Can I do anything more for you?”

The other man’s breathing was somewhat labored, and his face was still drained of color. He looked at Alatriste for a long while, as if he found it hard to make out his features.

“Tell me your name,” he murmured at last in a hoarse voice.

Alatriste was brushing dust from his boots with his hat.

“My name is my affair,” he replied coldly, putting his hat back on. “And I don’t give a damn about yours.”

Don Francisco de Quevedo and I saw him enter just as the guitars were signaling the end of the interlude. Hat in hand, short cape folded over one arm, sword pressed to his side, and head lowered so as not to bother anyone as—with many a “Forgive me, sir,” “Excuse me,” “May I come past?”—he pushed his way through the people crowding the yard. He arrived at the front of the lower gallery, greeted the constable of the theater, paid sixteen maravedís to the man selling tickets for the tiered seats on the right, then came up the steps and joined us where we were sitting on a bench in the front row, next to the balustrade and near the stage. I was surprised they had let him in, given how packed the theater was, with people still standing out in the street, protesting because there was no more room; later, however, I learned that he had managed to slip in, not through the main door, but through the carriage gate, which was normally used by the ladies to reach the section reserved for them. The porter there—wearing a buffcoat to protect him from the knife-thrusts of those trying to sidle in without paying—was apprenticed to the apothecary in Puerta Cerrada owned by Tuerto Fadrique, an old friend of the captain’s. Nevertheless, once the captain had greased the porter’s palm, paid for the entrance fee and for his seat, and made the usual charitable donation to Madrid’s hospitals, the cost came to two reales: no small drain on the captain’s purse, when you think that, for the same price, you could usually get a seat in the upper gallery. Then again, this was a new play by Tirso. At the time—along with the venerable Lope de Vega and that other young poet treading hard on his heels, Pedro Calderón—this Mercedarian friar, whose real name was Gabriel Téllez, was both filling the purses of theater-owners and actors and delighting his adoring public, although he never reached the heights of glory and popularity enjoyed by the great Lope. The Madrid garden near Prado Alto from which the play took its name was a splendid, peaceful place, much frequented by the court and known as a fashionable spot, perfect for a romantic rendezvous, and, as I had seen during the first act, it was being used to good effect. The moment Petronila appeared, dressed as a man, in boots and spurs, alongside Tomasa disguised as a young lackey, and before the beautiful María de Castro had even opened her mouth, the audience had begun applauding wildly, even the mosqueteros —the musketeers, or groundlings—who were, as usual, crammed into an area at the back of the yard. Their name derived from their habit of always standing together, wearing cape, sword, and dagger, like soldiers ready to be inspected or to go into action—well, that and their tendency to make rowdy comments and to boo. This time, however—urged on by their leader, the shoemaker Tabarca, the musketeers had greeted Tomasa’s words, “Maid and court are two ideas in mutual contradiction,” with warm applause and the grave approving nods of real connoisseurs. It was always important to gain the musketeers’ approval. This was a time when bullfights and plays were attended by both the common people and the nobility, a time when there was a real passion for the theater, and much depended on the success or failure of a first night, so much so that even famous playwrights, hoping to win the musketeers’ favor, would often address a prologue full of praise to that noisy, hard-to-please audience:

Those who have it in their power

To make a play seem good or dire . . .

For in that picturesque Spain of ours—so extreme in its good qualities, and in its bad—no doctor was ever punished for killing a patient through bloodletting and incompetence, no lawyer was ever banned from practicing because he was conniving, corrupt, or useless, no royal functionary was ever stripped of his privileges, having been caught with his hand in the money box; but there was no such forgiveness for a poet whose lines did not scan or who failed to hit the mark. Indeed, it seemed sometimes that the audience got more pleasure from seeing a bad play than a good one; they enjoyed and applauded the latter, of course, but a bad play gave them license to whistle, talk, shout, and hurl insults—“A pox on’t,” “I’faith,” “Od’s blood,” “Why, not even Turks and Lutherans would put on such a shambles,” et cetera. The most hopeless of block-heads made themselves out to be experts, and duennas and clumsy serving wenches assumed the role of learned and discerning critics and rattled their keys to show their disapproval. They thus found an outlet for that most Spanish of pleasures, namely, venting all the spleen they felt for their rulers by kicking up a row in the safety of the crowd. For, as everyone knows, Cain was an hidalgo, a pure-blooded Christian, and a Spaniard.

Anyway, as I was saying, Captain Alatriste finally joined us, where we had been saving him a seat until another member of the audience demanded to take it. Wanting to avoid a quarrel—not out of cowardice but out of respect for the place and the circumstances—don Francisco de Quevedo had let the importunate fellow do as he wished, warning him, however, that the seat was already taken and that as soon as its rightful occupant arrived, he would have to relinquish it. The disdainful “Hmm, we’ll see about that” with which the man responded as he made himself comfortable was immediately transformed into a look of wary respect when the captain appeared. Don Francisco shrugged and indicated to the captain his now occupied place on the bench, and my master fixed the intruder with his cold green eyes. The man was a wealthy artisan (as I found out later, he held the lease on the ice wells in Calle de Fuencarral), and the sword hanging from his leather belt looked about as much in keeping with him as a harquebus would on a Christ. He took in at one glance the captain’s ice-cold eyes, his veteran’s bushy mustache, the guard on his sword all dented and scuffed, and the long, narrow dagger, the hilt of which was just visible at his hip. Without saying a word, as silent as a clam, he gulped hard and, on the pretext of leaning over to buy a glass of mead from a passing vendor, shuffled farther up the bench, robbing his neighbor on the other side of some of his space, but freeing up my master’s place entirely.

“I thought you weren’t coming,” commented don Francisco.

“I met with a slight setback,” replied the captain, shifting his sword slightly to one side so that he could sit more comfortably.

He smelled of sweat and metal, as in times of war. Don Francisco noticed the stain on the sleeve of his doublet.

“Is that your blood?” he asked, concerned, arching his eyebrows behind his spectacles.

“No.”

The poet nodded gravely, looked away, and made no further comment. As he himself once said: Friendship is composed of shared rounds of wine, a few sword fights fought shoulder to shoulder, and many timely silences. I, too, was looking at my master with some concern, but he shot me a reassuring look and a faint distracted smile.

“Everything in order, Íñigo?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“How was the farce before the interlude?”

“Oh, excellent. It was called The Coachman Cometh, by Quiñones de Benavente. We laughed so much we cried.”

Then all talk stopped, for at that point the guitars ceased playing. The musketeers at the back of the yard hissed furiously and cursed impatiently, demanding silence in their usual ill-mannered way. There was a furious fluttering of fans in the ladies’ sections up above and below; women ceased signaling to men and vice versa; the sellers of limes and mead withdrew with their baskets and demijohns; and, behind the shutters on the balconies, the people of quality returned to their places. On one such balcony, I spotted the Count of Guadalmedina—who paid the vast sum of two thousand reales a year to ensure a good seat at all the new plays—along with a few gentlemen friends and some ladies. At another window sat don Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares, accompanied by his family. Our king was not, alas, there, even though this fourth Philip of ours was very fond of the theater and often attended, either openly or incognito. On this occasion, however, he was still tired from his recent exhausting journey to Aragon and Catalonia, during which don Francisco de Quevedo—whose star was still in the ascendant at court—had formed part of the entourage, as he had in Andalusia. The poet could doubtless have had a seat as a guest on one of those upper balconies, but he was a man who liked to mingle with the populace, preferring the lively atmosphere in the lower sections of the Corral, and, besides, there he could enjoy the company of his good friend Diego Alatriste. For while Alatriste may have been a soldier, swordsman, and a man of few words, he was also reasonably well educated, having read good books and seen a great deal of theater; and although he never gave himself airs and mostly kept his opinions to himself, he nevertheless had a sharp eye for a good play and was never taken in by the easy effects with which some playwrights larded their work in order to win the favor of the ordinary people. This was not the case with such great writers as Lope, Tirso, or Calderón; and even when they did resort to the tricks of the trade, their inventive skill marked the difference between their noble stratagems and the ignoble impostures of lesser writers. Lope himself described this better than anyone:

Whenever the time comes to write a play

I put Aristotle under lock and key

And stow Terence and Plautus out of the way

So that I’m deaf to their shouts and pleas,

For even mute books have something to say.

This should not be taken as an apology by that Phoenix of Inventiveness for employing stratagems lacking in taste, but, rather, as an explanation of why he refused to conform to the tastes of those learned neo-Aristotelian scholars, who, as one man, censured his wildly successful plays, yet would have given their right arm to put their name to them or, better still, to take the money. The play that afternoon was not, of course, by Lope but by Tirso, although the result was similar, for the work, a so-called cloak-and-sword drama, contained much wonderful poetry and turned, inevitably, on love and intrigue, but touched also on more somber themes: for example, Madrid as a place of deception and delusion, a place of falsehood where the valiant soldier comes to be rewarded for his valor and finds only disillusion; it also criticized the Spaniards’ scorn for work and their hunger for a life of luxury beyond that appropriate to their station. For this, too, was a very Spanish tendency, one that had already dragged us into the abyss several times before and one that would persist for years to come, exacerbating the moral infirmity that destroyed the Spanish empire, that empire of two worlds—the legacy of hard, arrogant, brave men who had emerged out of eight centuries spent cutting Moorish throats, with nothing to lose and everything to gain. In the year one thousand six hundred and twenty-six—when the events I am relating took place—the sun had not yet set upon Spain, although it very soon would. Seventeen years later, as a lieutenant at Rocroi, I would hold on high our tattered flag, despite the battering from the French cannon, and would myself bear witness to the sad fading of our former glory as I stood in the midst of the last squadron formed by our poor, faithful infantry. When an enemy officer asked me how many men there had been in the old, now decimated regiment, I said simply: “Count the dead.” And it was there that I closed Captain Alatriste’s eyes for the last time.

But I will speak of these things when the moment arrives. Let us return to the Corral de la Cruz and that afternoon’s performance of a new play. The resumption of the play aroused the same state of expectancy that I described earlier. From our bench, the captain, don Francisco, and I were now gazing across at the stage, where the second act was just beginning. Petronila and Tomasa came on again, leaving to the spectators’ imagination the beauty of the garden, which was only hinted at by an ivy-clad shutter placed at one of the stage entrances. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the captain lean forward and rest his arms on the balustrade. His aquiline profile was lit by a bright ray of sunlight that found its way through a tear in the awning erected to shade the audience from the glare, for the Corral faced west and was on a hill. Both female players looked very striking in their male costumes; this was a fashion which neither pressure from the Inquisition nor royal edict had managed to expunge from the theater, for the simple reason that people liked it too much. Similarly, when some of Castile’s more Pharisaic councilors—egged on by certain fanatical clerics—tried to ban plays in Spain altogether, this was again thwarted by the ordinary people, who refused to have this pleasure taken away from them, arguing moreover, and quite rightly, too, that part of the price of every ticket went to support good works and hospitals.

However, to go back to the play, the two women disguised as men stepped out onto the stage and were warmly applauded by the audience—packing yard, tiered seats, galleries, and balconies—and when María de Castro, in her role as Petronila, spoke these lines:

Count me, Bargas, as good as dead,

My mind is gone, I am not myself . . . the musketeers, who, as I mentioned before, were very hard to please indeed, showed clear signs of approval, standing on tiptoe in order to get a better view; and, in the upper gallery, the women stopped munching on hazelnuts, limes, and cherries. María de Castro was the most beautiful and most famous actress of her day; she embodied, as no other actress, the strange, magnificent human reality that was our theater, a theater that always hovered between, on the one hand, holding up a mirror to everyday life—at times a satirical, distorting mirror—and, on the other, presenting us with the most beautiful and thrilling of fantasies. La Castro was a spirited woman, with a lovely figure and an even lovelier face: dark, almond eyes, white teeth, pale skin, and a beautiful, well-proportioned mouth. Other women envied her beauty, her clothes, and her way of speaking the verse. Men admired her as an actress and lusted after her as a woman, and this latter fact met with no opposition from her husband, Rafael de Cózar, who was equally celebrated as an actor and as one of the glories of the Spanish stage. I will have more to tell of him later, but for now I will just say this: Cózar specialized in playing fathers, witty knaves, saucy servants, and rustic mayors, roles which—to the delight of adoring audiences—he performed with great style and swagger. Theatrical talents aside, however, Cózar had no qualms about allowing discreet access to the charms of the four or five women in his company, on receipt, naturally, of an agreed fee. The women were, of course, all married, or at least passed as such in order to meet the requirements of edicts that had been in effect since the days of the great Philip II. As Cózar said, with pleasing effrontery, it would be both selfish and lacking in charity—that theological virtue—not to share great art with those who can afford to pay for it. His own wife, María de Castro (years later it was learned that their marriage was, in fact, a sham), proved to be a mine more profitable even than those of Peru, although he always held in reserve—as the most exquisite of delicacies—that Aragonese beauty with chestnut hair and the sweetest of voices. In short, the clear-headed Cózar fitted, as few men else, this dictum by Lope:

The honor of the married man is a castle

In which the enemy is the castle’s keeper.

Let us, though, be as fair as the present story demands. The truth is that La Castro did sometimes have less venal ideas and tastes, and it was not always jewelry that made her lovely eyes shine. Men, as the saying goes, are there to be kissed, cozened, or cuckolded. As far as kissing goes, I will just say, dear reader, that María de Castro and Diego Alatriste were rather more than just friends—the captain’s ill humor and the quarrel with Caridad la Lebrijana were not unrelated to this fact—and that afternoon at the Corral de la Cruz, during the second act, the captain kept his eyes fixed on the actress, while I kept looking from him to her. I felt concerned for my master and sad for La Lebrijana, of whom I was very fond. Then again, I was also thrilled to the core to be there, reliving the impression La Castro had made on me three or four years earlier, on my first visit to the theater to see El Arenal de Sevilla, in the Corral del Príncipe, on that memorable day when everyone, including Charles, Prince of Wales and the then Duke of Buckingham, was embroiled in a fight in the presence of Philip IV himself. I may not have thought the lovely actress the most beautiful creature on earth—that title belonged to another woman known to you, dear reader, a woman with devilish blue eyes—but I was as stirred by her looks as every other man present. I could not have imagined then how María de Castro would complicate my master’s life, and mine, placing both of us in the gravest of dangers, us and the king, whose life, during that period, was quite literally on a knife-edge. All of this I propose to recount in this new adventure and thus prove that whenever a beautiful woman is involved, there is no madness into which a man will not fall, no abyss into which he will not peer, and no situation of which the devil will not take full advantage.

Between the second and third acts, the musketeers called for and were given a jácara entitled Doña Isabel the Thief. This was a famous ballad written in thieves’ slang and was, on this occasion, sung with great gusto by a mature, but still attractive, actress called Jacinta Rueda. I, however, could not give it my full attention, because the moment she started singing, a stagehand came up the steps, bearing a message for Señor Diego Alatriste, saying that he was expected in the dressing rooms. The captain and don Francisco de Quevedo exchanged looks, and when my master got to his feet, the poet shook his head disapprovingly and said:

Happy the man who dies on leaving ’em

Or succeeds in living without their love,

Or, better yet, gets to dig their grave.

The captain shrugged, picked up hat and cape, muttered a brusque “Stay out of my business, don Francisco,” donned his hat, and pushed his way past the other spectators on the bench. Quevedo gave me an eloquent look which I took to mean what it usually did, and so I left my seat to follow my master. “Let me know if there’s any trouble,” his eyes had said from behind his spectacles, “two swords are better than one.” Conscious of my responsibilities, I checked that the dagger I wore at my belt was in place and, discreet as a mouse, went after the captain, hoping that this time we might be able to watch the end of the play in peace. It would, after all, have been both a shame and an insult to spoil this first performance of Tirso’s play.

Diego Alatriste had been here before and knew the way. He walked down the steps from the benches, turned left opposite the passageway that housed the stall selling mead, and followed the corridor that led underneath the boxes to the stage and the actors’ dressing rooms. At the far end, his old comrade from Flanders, the lieutenant of constables, Martín Saldaña, was standing on the steps, chatting with the owner of the Corral and a couple of acquaintances, who were also theater people. Alatriste stopped for a moment to greet them and immediately noticed the worried look on Saldaña’s face. He was just taking his leave when Saldaña called him back and, casually, as if suddenly recollecting some minor matter, placed his hand on his arm and whispered gravely:

“Gonzalo Moscatel is in there.”

“So?”

“Best let sleeping dogs lie.”

Alatriste’s expression remained entirely inscrutable, then he said:

“You can keep your nose out of my business too.”

And he stalked off, leaving his friend scratching his beard and doubtless wondering who else had poked his nose in where it wasn’t wanted. A little farther on, Alatriste drew aside a curtain and found himself in a windowless chamber used as a storeroom for the wood and the painted back-cloths needed for the stage machinery and any scene changes. On the other side were various curtained cubicles that served as the actresses’ dressing rooms, the men’s being on the floor below. The room itself, which, beyond yet another curtain, gave onto the stage, was used by members of the company waiting to go on, but also served as an area to receive admirers. At that moment, it was occupied by half a dozen men, amongst them actors costumed and ready to take the stage as soon as the ballad was over—Jacinta Rueda could be heard on the other side of the curtain, singing the famous line “Pursued by the law, by bailiffs beset”—as well as a few gentlemen who, by virtue of their social status or their wealth, had been given permission to meet the actresses. One of these men was don Gonzalo Moscatel.

I followed the captain into the room and politely greeted Martín Saldaña as soon as I felt his eyes fix on me. The face of one of his companions on the landing seemed familiar, but I could not place it. In the corridor, where I stood, leaning against the wall, I saw my master and the gentlemen waiting inside exchange curt nods, but none of them doffed their hats. The only man not to respond to his greeting at all was don Gonzalo Moscatel, a picturesque character to whom I should perhaps introduce you. Señor Moscatel looked as if he had stepped straight out of a cloak-and-sword drama: he was big and burly, sported a ferocious mustache with extraordinarily long, upright tips, and was dressed with a mixture of elegance and bravado that managed to be simultaneously comic and alarming. He was got up like a fop, with a lace Walloon collar over his purple doublet, old-fashioned baggy breeches, a short French cape, silk stockings, black felt boots, and a leather belt studded with old silver reales and from which hung an extremely long sword; for he also fancied himself a bit of a ruffian, the kind who struts about uttering oaths—“Od’s blood,” “A pox on’t”—twirling his mustaches and clanking his sword. He claimed, furthermore, to be a poet, and made a great show of his friendship with Góngora, for which there was not the slightest basis in fact; he also perpetrated some infamous, verbose poems which, being a man of ample means, he was able to have printed at his own expense. Only one loathsome, fawning fellow poetaster had bothered to pay him court and extol the virtues of his verse. This same wretch, one Garciposadas, who penned stiff, dictionary-bound poetry—a pyre he builds her and constructs for her a wall, you know the kind of thing—wrote with a quill from the wing of the angel who visited Sodom and prospered by licking boots at court. He was, alas, burned in one of the very last autos-da-fé, condemned as a softling, that is, as one who had committed the nefarious sin. Don Gonzalo Moscatel had thus been left with no one to praise his muse to the skies until the softling’s place was taken by a slimy, pettifogging lawyer named Saturnino Apolo, an inveterate flatterer and emptier of other people’s purses, who shamelessly wheedled money out of Moscatel, and to whom we will also return later on. Otherwise, Moscatel had reached his position in society thanks to his role as chief supplier of meat, pork included, to the city’s butchers, and thanks also—a few personal bribes aside—to the dowry of his late wife, whose father had been a judge of the kind whose justice was not so much blind as one-eyed, and who preferred the scales of justice to be weighted down with a few doubloons. The widower Moscatel had no children of his own, only a young orphaned niece over whom he stood guard in his house in Calle de la Madera like Cerberus, the hound of Hades. He was also keen to become a member of some military order and was sure, sooner or later, to end up with a red cross emblazoned on his doublet. In this Spain full of crooked, rapacious functionaries, you could get anything you liked, so long as you had stolen enough money to pay for it.

Out of the corner of his eye, Captain Alatriste could see that Gonzalo Moscatel was giving him a fierce look and that his hand was resting in readiness on the hilt of his sword. Alas, they knew each other all too well, and each time their paths crossed, the butcher’s rancorous gaze spoke volumes about the nature of their relationship. This dated from an incident two months earlier, one night in the small hours, when the captain, swathed up to his eyes in his cloak, was walking along the dim, moonlit streets to the Inn of the Turk. The sound of an argument was coming from Calle de las Huertas. He heard a woman’s voice and, as he drew nearer, saw two figures framed in a doorway. He did not care to get involved in lovers’ quarrels or to interfere in other people’s affairs; however, his path led him precisely in that direction, and he found no reason to take another. He eventually came across a man and woman standing outside the door of a house. Although they appeared to know each other, the lady, or whatever she was, seemed angry, and the man kept insisting that she let him in, at least so far as the hallway. She had a very fine voice, the voice of a beautiful woman, or at least of a young one. And, out of curiosity, the captain stopped for a moment to see what was going on. When the other man noticed him, he turned and said: “Be on your way, this is none of your business,” a command Alatriste took to be reasonable enough; and he was just about to do as asked, when the woman, in a serene and worldly tone, said to the other man: “Unless, of course, this gentleman can persuade you to leave me alone and take you with him.” Her remark placed the matter on a more uncertain footing, and so, after a moment’s thought, Alatriste asked the lady if this was her house. It was, she said; she was a married woman and the gentleman bothering her had no evil intentions but was an acquaintance of both her and her husband. He had escorted her home after an evening at the home of some friends, and it was now high time, as she put it, for every owl to return to his olive tree. The captain was pondering the mystery of why her husband was not there at the door to resolve the matter, when the other man interrupted his thoughts with a few surly oaths, insisting that he clear off at once. In the darkness, the captain heard the sound of a span of steel being removed from its scabbard. The die was cast, and the cold night looked set to grow warmer. The captain stepped to one side in order to place himself in the shadow and the other man in the light from the moon that was slowly creeping up over the rooftops; he unfastened his cloak, wrapped it around his left arm, and unsheathed his sword. The other man did likewise, and both made a few rather halfhearted thrusts, always keeping a safe distance, with Alatriste saying nothing and his opponent cursing nineteen to the dozen. Eventually, the racket they were making brought a servant bearing a candle running out of the house, followed by the lady’s husband. The latter—in nightshirt, slippers, and tasseled nightcap—was wielding a stubby sword in his right hand and saying, “What’s going on here? Who dares cast a slur on my house and my honor?” and other similar remarks, spoken in what Alatriste suspected to be a distinctly mocking tone. The husband, it turned out, was a very pleasant, courteous man, short in stature and with a thick, German-style mustache that met with his side-whiskers. With appearances and husbandly honor duly saved, peace was restored in the nicest possible way. The night owl’s name was don Gonzalo Moscatel, and the husband—once he had handed his own sword over to his servant for safekeeping—spoke of him as a friend of the family, adding, in conciliatory fashion, that he was sure it had all been a most unfortunate misunderstanding. This was all starting to look like a scene from a play, and Alatriste nearly laughed out loud when he learned that the gentleman in the tasseled nightcap was none other than the famous actor Rafael de Cózar—a man of great wit and theatrical skill, and an Andalusian to boot—and that his wife was the celebrated actress María de Castro. He had seen them both on stage, but that night, by the light of the large candle held on high by the servant, was the first time he had seen La Castro at such close quarters. With her cloak barely covering her lovely figure, she looked extraordinarily beautiful and clearly found the whole situation most amusing. She had doubtless experienced other such occasions, for actresses were not, as a rule, women of cast-iron virtue; indeed, it was rumored that her husband, once he had huffed and puffed and brandished his famous sword—which was known throughout Spain—was usually very tolerant of such admirers, whether it was his wife they were interested in or one of the other women in his company, especially if, as was the case with that supplier of meat to Madrid, the admirer had the where-withal. His evident genius as actor aside, it was accepted as a universal truth that no man’s purse was safe with him. This perhaps explained the length of time it had taken him to come downstairs to defend his honor. As people used to say:

Take twelve cuckolds or, rather, players—

For they hardly differ as one may gauge—

Add half a dozen ladies of the stage,

And you’ll have the six half-wives of the

aforesaid players.

The captain, fairly embarrassed by the whole affair, was about to make his excuses and continue on his way, when the wife very sweetly thanked him for his intervention, although it was impossible to know whether she did so in order to provoke her pursuer or simply because she enjoyed that subtle and dangerous game in which women so often engage. Then she looked him up and down and invited him to visit her at the Corral de la Cruz, where they were giving the final performances of a play by Rojas Zorrilla. She was smiling broadly as she said this, showing off the perfect oval of her face and her equally perfect white teeth, which Luis de Góngora—don Francisco de Quevedo’s mortal enemy—would doubtless have compared to mother-of-pearl or tiny seed pearls. Alatriste, an old hand in these and other such situations, saw in that look some kind of promise.

And two months later, there he was in the dressing rooms of the Corral de la Cruz, having enjoyed the fruits of that promise several times—Cózar’s sword not having reappeared—and more than ready to continue doing so. Meanwhile, don Gonzalo Moscatel, whom he had met on subsequent occasions with no further consequences, continued to shoot him fierce, jealous looks. María de Castro was not a woman to keep just one iron in the fire, and she continued worming money out of Moscatel, flirting shamelessly with him, but never allowing things to go any further than that—every meeting at the Gate of Guadala jara cost the butcher a fortune in jewels and fine cloths—and she used Alatriste, whom the other man knew all too well by reputation, to keep him at bay. Thus, ever hopeful, and ever starved, the butcher obstinately persisted, refusing to give up his chance of bliss. He was encouraged in this, too, by La Castro’s husband, who, as well as being a great actor was also an out-and-out scoundrel, and, as he had with other such admirers, continued to use vague promises to squeeze Moscatel’s purse dry. Alatriste knew, of course, that—Moscatel apart—he was not the only man to enjoy the actress’s favors. Other men visited her, and it was said that even the Count of Guadalmedina and the Duke of Sessa had exchanged more than words with her; as don Francisco de Quevedo put it, she was a woman who charged a thousand ducats a stumble. The captain could not compete with either man in rank or money; he was simply a veteran soldier who earned a living as a paid swordsman. Yet, for some reason that escaped him—women’s souls had always seemed to him unfathomable—María de Castro granted him gratis what she denied outright to others or for which she charged her weight in gold:

An important point, pray listen to me:

With moneyed Moors she asks a lot,

With Christians she does it for free.

Diego Alatriste drew aside the curtain. He was not in love with that woman, nor with any other, but María de Castro was the most beautiful actress of her day, and he enjoyed the rare privilege of occasionally having her all to himself. No one was going to offer him a kiss like the one she was now placing on his lips, when, later, a span of steel, a bullet, disease, or time itself would set him sleeping forever in his grave.