Arturo Perez-Reverte - The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet

“You’re risking your life,” I heard don Francisco say, and a little farther on—the captain was walking beside him in silence, his eyes somber beneath the brim of his hat—he said it again:

“You’re risking your life, you know. That particular cow bears someone else’s brand.”

They stopped, and I did too, by the parapet of the little bridge, in order to allow a few carriages to pass, carrying off ladies of the court and giving way to the trollops and whores who, with nightfall, would be out looking for likely lances to pierce their shields, and to loose young women, faces half covered, who, behind the backs of fathers or brothers, on the pretext of going to a late mass or on a charitable errand, and accompanied by an indulgent duenna, were off either to find or to meet some secret lover. Quevedo doffed his hat to an acquaintance in one of the carriages, then turned back to my master.

“It’s as absurd as a doctor bothering to marry an old woman, when it’s perfectly within his power to kill her.”

The captain tugged at his mustache, unable to repress a smile, but still he said nothing.

“If you insist,” said Quevedo, “you’re as good as dead.”

These words startled me. I studied my master’s impassive aquiline profile silhouetted against the declining afternoon light.

“Well, I have no intention of simply surrendering,” he said at last.

His friend looked at him, intrigued.

“Surrendering what? The woman?”

“No, my life.”

There was another silence; then the poet, glancing around him, whispered something along the lines of: “You’re mad, Captain. No woman is worth risking your neck for. This is a very dangerous game indeed.” My master merely smoothed his mustache and said nothing more. And after uttering a few curses and “I’faith”s, don Francisco shrugged.

“Well, don’t rely on me for help,” he said. “I don’t fight kings.”

The captain looked at him again but made no comment. We walked back toward the garden’s boundary walls, and shortly afterward, halfway between the Torrecilla and one of the fountains, we saw in the distance an open carriage drawn by two fine mules. I paid it no attention until I saw my master’s face. I followed his gaze and saw, seated in the right-hand side of the carriage, María de Castro, all dressed up for the ride and looking very beautiful. To her left rode her diminutive husband, with his smiling, bewhiskered face; he was carrying an ivory-handled cane and wearing a gold-braided doublet and an elegant French-style beaver hat, which he was constantly having to remove to greet acquaintances along the way. He was clearly feeling delighted with life and with the excitement that he and his wife aroused.

“Were there ever two finer pairs of hands,” commented don Francisco wryly, “hers for seducing and his for filching? A very elegant net for catching fish.”

The captain said nothing. Some ladies clutching rosaries and wearing scapulars, robes, and full black skirts, were standing nearby with their husbands; they immediately drew into a knot, whispering and furiously fanning themselves as they shot glances at the carriage sharp as Berber arrows; meanwhile, their grave and equally black-clad husbands struggled to keep their composure, twirling their mustaches and staring at the carriage with barely concealed lust. As the actors approached, don Francisco told a story illustrating Cózar’s blithe, inventive nature. In one particular scene during a performance in Ocaña, he had forgotten to bring on stage with him the dagger with which he was supposed to slit another actor’s throat. When he realized his mistake, he had immediately snatched off his own false beard and pretended to strangle the other man with it. Afterward, the company had had to flee across the fields, pursued by furious townsfolk hurling stones at them.

“He’s altogether a very jolly rascal,” said Quevedo.

As the carriage drew nearer, Cózar recognized don Francisco and my master, and the rogue bowed very reverently, a bow in which I—trained now in courtly subtleties—saw a high degree of mockery. “With such courtesies, and with my wife,” the gesture said, “I pay for my doublet and my hat, and your purse is my revenge.” Or, in Quevedo’s words:

He’s more of a cuckold, he who pays,

Than the man who takes the money,

For I get to keep the lovely wife,

The beehive, and the honey.

As for the actor’s spouse, the look and the smile that she directed at the captain spoke eloquently of very different things—complicity and promise. She made as if to cover her face with her cloak, but then did not, a gesture that was somehow more provocative than if she had done nothing; and I noticed that my master slowly and discreetly took off his hat and stood there with it in his hand until the carriage had borne the actors away down the avenue. Then he put his hat back on again, turned, and met the hate-filled gaze of don Gonzalo Moscatel, who, one hand resting on the hilt of his sword, was watching us from the other side of the avenue, angrily chewing the ends of his mustache.

“Ye gods,” muttered don Francisco, “that’s all we need.”

The butcher was standing on the running board of a private carriage that was as elaborately decorated as a Flemish castle, with two dapple-gray mules between the shafts and a coachman on the driver’s seat; inside, next to the open door on which don Gonzalo Moscatel was leaning, sat a young woman. She was the orphaned niece with whom he lived and whom he wished to see married to his friend, the lawyer Saturnino Apolo, a base and mediocre man if ever there was one, who apart from taking the bribes proper to his profession—and which were the origin of his friendship with the butcher—frequented Madrid’s narrow little literary world and fancied himself a poet, which he wasn’t, for his only skill lay in bleeding money out of successful authors, flattering them, and holding their chamber pot, if I may put it so, like someone playing for free in the gaming den of the Muses. He and Moscatel were as thick as thieves, and he liked to boast that he knew everyone in the world of the theater, thus fomenting the butcher’s hopes with regard to María de Castro and wheedling more money out of him, meanwhile hoping to get the niece as well as her dowry. For that was his roguish specialty: living off other people’s purses, so much so that don Francisco de Quevedo himself, seeing that all Madrid despised the wretch, dedicated a famous sonnet to him, which ended with these lines:

Never your lyre, always a purse you follow,

You offspring of Cacus, you bastard of Apollo!

Moscatel’s young niece was very pretty, her suitor the lawyer utterly loathsome, and don Gonzalo, her uncle, absurdly jealous of her honor. The whole situation—niece, marriage, don Gonzalo’s theatrical character and temperament, and his jealousy of Captain Alatriste regarding María de Castro—seemed more the stuff of plays than of real life; after all, Lope and Tirso filled the theaters with such plots. Then again, the theater owed its success precisely to the fact that it reflected what went on in the street, and the people in the street, in turn, imitated what they saw on the stage. Thus, in the thrilling, colorful theater that was my century, we Spaniards sometimes tricked ourselves out to play comedy, and sometimes to play tragedy.

“I bet he won’t raise any objections,” murmured don Francisco.

Alatriste, who was abstractedly studying Moscatel through half-closed eyes, turned to the poet.

“Objections to what?”

“To vanishing, of course, when he finds out he’s been encroaching on the royal domain.”

The captain smiled faintly but made no comment. From the far side of the avenue, the butcher, bristling with gravity and wounded pride, continued to shoot us murderous looks. He was wearing a short French cape, slashed sleeves, garters of the same vermilion red as the feather in his hat, and a very long sword with ornate guard and quillons. I looked at the niece. She was modest, dark-complexioned, and wore a full-skirted dress, a mantilla on her head, and a gold cross around her neck.